Out Now: LULL " Like a slow river " - Glacial Movements Records -

[GLACIAL MOVEMENTS]

Tracklist:

1. Whiteout  (14:30)
2. The sheet  (14:37)
3. Like a slow river  (14:02)
4. Treeless grounds  (12:25)
5. Illusion of unbroken surface  (04:31)

Created and Mixed by M.J. Harris February/March 2008 for Glacial Movements Records
All right reserved

Cat.number  GM004
Format  CD 6 panels digipack
Photo by Bjarne Riesto
Graphic solution and artwork by Oleg (Tantric Harmonies)

After a long period of silence, Glacial Movements Records is glad to announce you the return of the most important representative of ambient isolationist music ever: the wonderful English artist Mick J. Harris aka LULL (Scorn, Painkiller, Napalm Death).Unquestionable genius of the last century's second half European music and point of reference about the rising isolationist aesthetics, being on the same wavelength as post-rock last scenaries.

"Like a slow river" it's a work characterized by sharp and minimal atmospheres but also dark, cold and huge such as big bodies of ice which slowly move carried by an endless river. The five compositions of "Like a slow river" reach the high expectations of the previous works such as "Cold Summer", "Continue" and the "Murder Ballads" trilogy with Martin Bates. With no doubt, this is the coldest and darkest work ever composed by this pioneer of industrial-ambient music. You all will be led to the oblivion of your existence....the freezing darkness of these glacial night is going to come down on your bodies and minds....you'll fall in your deepest sleep with the far echo of glacial runnings....

....the way to eternity is in front of you.....

LULL is Back!!

Contacts:

GLACIAL MOVEMENTS RECORDS

www.glacialmovements.com
www.myspace.com/glacialmovements
info@glacialmovements.com

illegal download kills Glacial Movements!!

[MPECK]

I am certainly looking forward to getting a copy of this. Mick is an outstanding artist and his Lull project was "one of those" that pulled me into this genre.

[kreutzfeldt]

the most important representative of ambient isolationist music ever: the wonderful English artist Mick J. Harris aka LULL

probably equalled in importance by thomas köner, but the new release is certainly good news nonetheless!. harris' 1996 collaboration with james plotkin called collapse still stands to me as the penultimate drone effort, and a huge earopener back in the days of cheesy ambient compilations.

[GLACIAL MOVEMENTS]

Hello,

a new review of LULL "Like a slow river" written by BDN @ White Line:

http://whiteline1.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/lull-like-a-slow-river-cd-glacial-movements/

Glacial Movements – I wondered how long a label could sustain its existence based upon a singular aesthetic theme, exploiting desolate, glacial atmospherics in a regular stream of releases. Yet, defying all my expectations, Glacial Movements has not only survived in these difficult economic times, but has actually thrived. I have watched them with interest, emerging from anonymity, and fledgling beginnings that demonstrated a flawed, but passionate approach, to now attracting one of the Isolationism /Dark Ambience scene's elder statesmen, Mick Harris of LULL.
The label now has a premier artist on its roster, and the packaging and design of "Like a Slow River" does justice to the sheer quality of this release. Harris infuses glorious and resonant precision into his work, with the soft focus shimmering atmospherics of "Whiteout", and "The Sheet", there is a sense of foreboding throughout, and we are immediately plunged into a bleak and desolate soundscape that rivals the work of Lustmord or Thomas Koner. The title track, and indeed each subsequent piece, deploys a serene, eerie fabric of sound, rich and reverberant tonalisms, time –dilated and expansive tracts, imbued with Arctic silence, and haunting ambience.

There are no end of descriptive words that can be employed to describe these soundscapes, most of which are used [perhaps over-used] on a regular basis, so without labouring the point any further this is an important release, marking a time and a place, defining and crystallising the label's whole aesthetic in a singular masterful release. Go and Buy Now. BGN

[GLACIAL MOVEMENTS]

A new review published @ BRAINWASHED and written by Simon Marshall-Jones   

http://www.brainwashed.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6926&Itemid=64

"Mick Harris' latest release as Lull is a quiet and stately album, the sounds at times being barely above a whisper, a state of affairs entirely in keeping with the motivating philosophy behind the Italian label Glacial Movements i.e., making us aware of the paradoxically fragile strength and crystalline beauty of the polar regions before it's too late.



The sussurating washes gently ebb and flow in frozen cadence, just like a floe-laden river in the Arctic, while simultaneously deep bass rumbles just on the edge of hearing run like submarine currents beneath the ice-bedecked surface. Riding the surface are the keening howls of biting winds and the hollow windings of tunnel-blown air. Those bass currents run fathoms deep while the frail ice above grinds and cracks between the walls of snow-bright chasms, reflecting pristine sunlight back into the cold depths of space. Just like the slow Arctic rivers too, this is in no particular hurry to get anywhere. Time in a place like this doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, where the accumulation of snow and ice forming the sculptural glaciers and cliffs took slow incremental millennia measured in millimeters, a place where an entire continent has the patience of geology. This is deep time, a time that bears no reference to the human; likewise its beauty, a quality forever beyond the reach of all but the most determined explorer, even in the 21st century. In perhaps an accidental coincidence (or perhaps, as is likely, a case of reading too much into things), each of the tracks gets progressively shorter and shorter, ranging from 14:33 down to 4:39, in a reflection perhaps of how the southern and northern continents, that have slowly evolved and remained practically static over the millennia are now, suddenly, due to our ignorance and ill-conceived environmental blindness, becoming compromised and fast disppearing—a slight conceit on my part maybe but nevertheless I feel it an observation worth pointing out.

Harris calls forth frozen atmospheres and ice-bound river and landscapes, shimmering reverberations trapped in water become clear glacial amber, and there to remain for untold years. Mirroring insects trapped in real amber, these are moments in time and slivers of the past, forever destined to play out their last moments in an endlessly abrupt memorial. These are both temporal and physical shards, meandering into the mysterious heart of inaccessibility; one gets the feeling that buried deep within the crystalline bosom of the polar continents is a similarly frozen secret, a deep secret that is known only to the ice and snow, and is whispered to the winds in the language of the slow rivers of ice. An icily haunting and ghostly ambience pervades each of these five pieces, almost akin to a physical presence that itself seems to hide secrets, ghosts endlessly wandering the wastes of the white desert searching for the frozen secret at the heart of a continent.

I have thoroughly enjoyed each of the five releases from Glacial Movements; label-owner Alessandro Tedeschi has a keen ear for the glacial and deeply icy in ambient music, and once again he has hit the spot with this CD from Harris. Yet again here is another imagining of the snowbound lands lying at the ends of the earth, and once again it succeeds in conjuring and evoking pristine images of mountainous bright eye-piercing white and over-arching azure blue, set amidst the foam-flecked lashings of the surrounding oceans. Deep ambience has always been my thing, and in my view it can't get any deeper than this: timeless frozen music for a timeless frozen place."

[GLACIAL MOVEMENTS]

A new review of LULL "Like a slow river" by Cyclic Defrost
http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/blog/?p=2047

"It's been a long, strange trip for Mick Harris. Once upon a time he was the drummer with Napalm Death, (in)famous for compacting heavy metal into super-concentrated tracks of sometimes just a few seconds duration. But he's gone to the other extreme with his dark ambient project Lull. Like a Slow River is his eight or ninth album under this name, and it's a challenging listen. Five tracks are listed on this 60 minute outing, but it might as well be one long suite, as the pieces all sound more or less the same. This disc exists in a hinterland somewhere between music and noise - there's no rhythm, harmony, or melody - and yet... If it's noise, it's not confrontational in the style of Whitehouse et al. It's the aural equivalent of standing on a hill, listening to the sound of the wind, looking out across a bleak, barren landscape - and in fact one of the tracks is titled 'Treeless Grounds'. The overall sound is reminiscent of Thomas Koner (and indeed Lull & Koner shared space on Virgin's groundbreaking Ambient 4: Isolationism CD back in 1994), but not as austere. Lull is unlikely to ever find himself on the cover of glossy magazines, but the few people who do buy this release will savour it, the way you would an expensive bottle of wine.

Ewan Burke "

[GLACIAL MOVEMENTS]

A new review of LULL "Like a slow river" @ IGLOO MAG written by Alan Lockett, Contributing Editor

http://www.igloomag.com/

(07.08.08) Mick (MJ) Harris, once known for a seemingly unlikely transmigration of the musical soul from death metal to isolationist ambient, is back, after a lull, appositely, as Lull. By now Harris has attained a hallowed place in the canon of Dark Ambient, alongside the likes of Lustmord and Thomas Köner. In terms of the foundations of a sub-genre, these last-mentioned were the ones who did the heavy digging work, with Harris arriving late to benefit from a ferment of industrial-ambient and dark-drone activity in the early-90s. In fact Harris, for all his accumulated kudos, was no great pioneer, the true founder of this inverted church being Brian "Lustmord" Williams, the true High Priest of Isolationist Rituals, who was fully forged in the UK industrial flame of the early 80s. In terms of input, being brutal, a tendency he would be familiar with as ex-Napalm Death merchant, Harris brought little to the sounding table other than a mimetic ear for the spooked and the downright desolate, sprung from a harsh audio-sensibility allied to a soundscaping skill which enabled him to find something aesthetically pleasing in the deepest and darkest recesses of the Muse's expression, most clearly seen on 1994's isolationist classic, Cold Summer.
And so to Like A Slow River, an atonal orchestration of sussurating and wheezing ebb and flow and rumblings of submarine currents beneath an ice-bedecked surface. Low-end eddies churn at bathyscape depths while the surface is perturbed with the sound of fissures forming and ice turning to meltwater. The music is unrelenting in its dronal creed, but Harris weaves movement into his slabs and wedges of sound, with arcing dives and slow falls inward effectively articulating a slow drift into the abyss. The topography depicted is desolate and bleak, rendered in tones unmoored from any harmonic or rhythmic referents, but Lull's sombre drone diaries are possessed of a kind of blasted heath cruel beauty. Five variations on a theme are rolled out, all forged with deep bass surges and eerie mid-range tonalities, distinction being created through the differing configurations of its sounding sources, varying resonances, modulations and vibrations, and shifts in cadence and timbre. Some tend more toward evacuated space ("Whiteout" and "The Sheet"), while others inhabit more alien zones ("Treeless Grounds" and "Illusion Of Unbroken Surface").
Like A Slow River is, ultimately, not so much an ambient album in the Eno tradition, but rather a softer reined-in extension of the industrial power electronics tradition, its sounds at times liminal, at times subsonic, almost tailor made to the motivating philosophy behind the doom-laden drift of Glacial Movements. Head Glacial Mover, Alessandro Tedeschi, claims a wider remit than the simply musical for GM, aiming to do his bit to help protect the Arctic and Antarctic areas by raising awareness of their gradual effacement through musical mediation, and more power to his environmental elbow. Some might see the conceptual programme as musically limiting but, like the many and subtly different Mozart symphonies or Bach fugues, it could equally be seen as a suggestive overarching theme driving many interpretations. So far, at least, it has given rise to several quite different takes - from Rapoon, Oophoi, and Tedeschi's own Netherworld. And Lull's addition is certainly on a par with these, and this work rivals those of his mentors, Lustmord and Köner, in the power of its dark poesis.

[GLACIAL MOVEMENTS]

And a new one reviewed by Larry Johnson for EARLAB

http://www.earlabs.org/release/review.asp?reviewID=1184

RATED: 10 / 10

"Mick Harris who has been composing isolationist ambient music as Lull since 1992 must feel right at home at Glacial Movements Records - a label that has rapidly made a name for itself by specializing in releasing exactly this style of ambient music. Following a few years of silence, Lull makes a impressive return with the release of Like A Slow River.
For me, Mick Harris is one part of a trio of elders of dark ambient music. Brian "Lustmord" Williams introduced me to the genre in general, Thomas Köner made me a believer in the eerie beauty of quiet, vast, dim soundscapes, and Lull has shown me just how cold and absolutely desolate dark ambient can be. Without classics like Paradise Disowned, Permafrost, and Cold Summer, its doubtful that the genre would have the same powerful appeal to me that it has had.
Just like the releasing label, Mick Harris certainly has a genuine passion for dark, brooding, isolationist ambient music and the merging of these two powerful purveyors of this genre was bound to result in something good. Every aspect of Like a Slow River reflects this fervor. Images of ice, glacial regions, and barren, windswept landscapes abound in not only in the sounds and beautiful artwork accompanying the six panel digipack but also in the suggestive track titles: Whiteout, The Sheet, Like a Slow River, Treeless Grounds, and Illusion of Unbroken Surface. Slow-moving, icy cold, iridescent drones are the rule on these five compositions whose deceivingly minimal, haunting ambiance creeps up on the listener, ever so slowly, numbing the senses and lulling the mind into a stupor.

[edited by mgriffin to fix broken link]

[drone on]

This is a very good dark ambient disc, much more effective on the headphones than on home system as it is so quiet and subtle.  Another excellent GM release. :-)