Electronica Review
Adenine releases debut ambient drone harp album
We’re taking things down a notch here, with the debut album release from Adenine, a pseudonym of Scottish composer and harpist Ailie Robertson. Ailie is an award-winning composer and performer with a list of credits and awards including the BBC Proms, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bang on a Can, and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. She’s currently the composer in residence for Sound Scotland and Glyndebourne Opera.
Adenine is Ailies debut album under the name Adenine, although she has released CDs of a more traditional harp style under her own name. Ambient field recordings of the natural world collide with melodic harp playing and ambient drones to take you on a relaxing journey. It’s a great album to listen to, allowing you to detox from the world around you whilst still engaging in the intricacies of the performances and ambient environs. It certainly rewards repeated listening.
The album opens with a track called Smirr, with an intro containing field recordings of a stream. Melodic and rhythmic layers of harp are added to build a wonderful texture of reverb and echo processed sounds….
Aftak is the longest track from the album at almost 10 minutes long, and presents layers of bowed wire-strung harp tones that evolve and add new harmonies to keep things engaging. The noise undercurrents add a menacing tone and extra interest to the sound…
Here’s Flindrikin, a track thats the most ‘electronic’ of the album, with voice samples and ambient tones underpinning some delicate melodic harp fragments…
You can listen to the whole album on Bandcamp, and there’s also a vinyl pressing, limited to 300 copies, that I’m sure will be a great addition to your ambient electronica collection…
https://electronica.org.uk/blog/adenine-releases-debut-ambient-drone-harp-album/