A fresh-faced debutant when In Moll first appeared in 2001, Markus Guentner made a record that has never once shown its age. It emerged from the early days of Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, following shortly after his contributions to the first compilation, including the remarkably lush and bell-strewn "Regensburg 1", and its reputation has since grown in the quietly stoic, unadvertised way ambient reputations do. Twenty-five years on, Black Knoll Editions returns it in its fullest form yet, remastered entirely in analogue by label boss Rafael Anton Irisarri and arriving on 6 November. To a British ear, this LP is instinctively Eno-esque in its enveloping production: continuous, decaying drones and slow, subtle bass tones, with synths and keys layered into a sonorous haze through which a handful of melodic fragments intermittently surface and plunge, circling rather than resolving. It's an expression of composure as sound, and also something close to serene isolation in a room whose walls are made of nothing but air. The reverb is applied with such unrestrained, almost ecclesiastical generosity that one braces for solemnity, and receives instead a kind of well-bred calm. That is the album's tension, a principle Guentner himself affirmed only last year in conversation with your favourite Scouse scribe, insisting that purely rational art fails and purely emotional art fails too – Apollonian discipline in the placement of every note, Dionysian dissolution in the fog it floats on. In a streaming economy that has all too lazily reduced ambient to playlist wallpaper for sleep routines, focus hacks and manifestation-queen affirmations, this album still demands to be listened to. The standout is "In Moll 3", exactly ten minutes of twilit ambient-techno drift in the lineage of Aphex Twin's early ambient works, with its propulsive yet somnolent rhythms and faintly industrial chimes steadily coalescing into a strangely sobering swell. And this works. Very well. It's a distinctly early-2000s idea of ambience, the post-Britpop comedown after the guitar-driven vitalism and drunken lairiness of the late nineties, and you're left with the volume lowered and the intensity on a low simmer (Solpadeine within reach, no less). The restoration of "In Moll 4", omitted from the original vinyl edition and pressed here for the first time, gives dedicated twelve-inch collectors the whole work in one package, plus Guentner's own measured reworking – a second opinion from the man who made it over two decades on. It's an ambient record with no interest in being anything else. It just plays. Ambient-techno devotees will keep it where they keep the good stuff, and fair play to them. A minor key, certainly. A minor work, hardly.
In Moll
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