Joachim Spieth & Warmth – Fragments album review
- Ambient Articles Genres
J. Simpson- 6 minutes read
Two titans of modern ambient music together to create an album of patient, crystalline ambient soundscapes for Affin Records.
The cover of Fragments – the first full-length collaboration between two of modern ambient music’s most prolific, reliable producers – looks like it could be a snowflake captured in HD macrophotography, a pile of feathers, or the cover art of some lost 4AD record. These contradictory associations serve as a fitting introduction for this immersive, spellbinding album of immersive arctic ambient, which is alternately steamy warm and frosty, soft yet cutting, alien yet somehow earthy and organic.
Fragments is the first feature-length collaboration between Affin Records labelhead Joachim Spieth and the relentlessly prolific Warmth – who also runs the Archives and Faint labels – after forming a mutual appreciation while collaborating on a series of remixes. The pair must’ve gotten fairly tight during their correspondence, as it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins in this misty, mysterious environment. While each of its segments is identifiable and satisfying on their own, like a New Romantic ballad played at 1/10th speed, Fragments feels like more of a cohesive whole rather than a sum of its parts, despite its scattershot name. Instead of songs, each track feels like a chapter in a narrative, a space to explore and get lost in, fulfilling ambient music’s potential to give voice to specific environments, no matter how unearthly they may be.
Album opener “Spectral” feels like piercing the veil of a sky blue exoplanet like some form of kingfisher, only to discover the obfuscating layer was a thick, dense wall of clouds.
“Exosphere” feels like the mystery of encountering this strange planet’s lifeforms for the first time, undulating like an emerald and jasper anemone forest in mid-air.
“Obscured,” the longest track of the bunch, could be the soundtrack for the ancient wisdom of prehistoric fungi lying dormant in our bloodstreams, awakened by distant suns.
It’s all impossibly lovely, impressively minimal, yet still somehow possessing an emotional nucleus and a genuine sense of musicality, however elongated and unobvious it may be.
Fragments does an amazing job of threading the needle between the alien and the familiar, sounding peaceful enough for a meditation playlist while still possessing the slight sense of unease that nearly all ambient music possesses when it’s done correctly. It’s a beguiling, fascinating ambient artifact to start the year off with. Here’s to many more collaborations between Joachim Spieth and Warmth!
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