Recorded in late 2011 early 2012 at Swamp Thang Studios, Jacksonville Florida
credits
released February 26, 2012
Michael Amason’s latest work, aptly titled The Inner Solar System, is an album about just that.
"The inner terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are paid homage to in sonic form. Four thunderous tracks of 20 plus minute waves of guitar driven drone split across two cds recall the absence and abyssal solitude of space, the desolation and magnitude of our heavenly bodies. The original concept for the album sprung from the recent MA/Fountainpen split cassette on which Michael contributed No God, Earth. Michael expounded on the concept with a phrase for each planet that takes into regard his own personal ruminations of the meaning of each celestial rock in non sequitur form. The accompanying music consists of heavy guitar drones, slowed either in process or post process, and then layered with tube amp feed back or the slow swells of pure sine waves. The over all effect is what sounds like an extinction, a blotting of the musicians hand from the work- leaving only the crushing oceanic purity of drone to dissolve in a listeners ear. The Inner Solar System insinuates the abrupt and troubling statement that, much like the planets they are based on, these notes and tones have existed before you, and will most certainly live on after you."
-Cookies 'N Cream Records
"Michael Amason’s double CD The Inner Solar System hearkens back to one of the first orchestral pieces to become a popular hit in its electronic interpretation, Gustav Holst’s The Planets (1914-16) by Tomita. It too is symphonic but in a far less dramatic and far more suggestive form. While Holst attempted to capture the astrological influences each planet was said to exercise, and pits various states against one another for colour and effect (war and peace, motion and statis), Amason slowly describes the orbits of the four planets nearest to the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Even though he might be considered proto-ambient with his strong influence from Ravel and Hinduism, Holst’s work is brash, virtuostic and modernist, while Amason is a postmodern ambient minimalist who moves the listener through restraint and duration. Waves of slowed and processed guitar drone on, once with a certain sweetness recalling the French horn, another time a sustained, monotonous thrum, a lone note from a piano tumbling off like an asteroid. Rather than influencing our lives, Amason reminds us of the vast emptiness and lonely indifference of the space through which the planets travel, underlined by the absences he ascribes each one—no light, no love, no God (that’s Earth) and no pain. Long after we have gone, unaware that we were ever here, they will remain, describing their circles. Amason’s drones allow us to ponder that a while."
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