01 Mar 2012 — Henning Lahmann
For someone who seems to have been around forever, not least on this blog, it came as a surprise to read that
Soft Terminal is actually to be considered the proper debut LP by Seattle drone/ambient mainstay Norm Chambers aka
Panabrite. What I've always admired most about his music is that despite all his playful experimentalism that frequently results in breathtakingly complex arrangements and layer over layer of analogue synthesis, each single track always remains instantly accessible and almost effortlessly enjoyable, and the eight tracks on
Soft Terminal are no exception to this. In fact, maybe his music has even never been more accessible than on tracks like "Janus", which adds a finger-picked acoustic guitar to the mix, or the sublime album opener "Rainbow Sequence", which you may listen to below, that starts with a heavily processed voice and simple, delayed chords before the composition develops a massive, sprawling soundscape that can only be called jaw-dropping. This is a superb effort, something we cannot recommend enough.
Soft Terminal is out today on
Digitalis Recordings. You may order
directly from the label
(US and Canada) or via
Boomkat (rest of the world).
