Aerial Service Area - Aerial Service Area

Truly a top class album on the legendary FAX-label. Aerial Service Area are Victor Sol and Nickolaus Heyduck, although 3 of the 5 tracks were co-produced by Atom Heart. The album is totally beatless, which in case of Victor Sol is pretty exceptional. All five tracks are very minimal, yet very engaging and haunting. ETI Encoding is nothing more than a modulating tone but it somehow manages to get your attention and sets the tone for an incredible epic to come.

Eternal keeps holding the tone of the first track, however it`s brighter than the first one but nevertheless extremely haunting and deep, it has the typical minimal approach of ambient from Atom Heart, an almost 19 minutes during trip that takes you towards the true destination of the album: an endless, deep chilling and spacey vacuum.

Liquid Water is the perfect bridge between the relaxing atmosphere from Eternal and the more intense part of Aerial Service Area: Highlow. This is the last shiny star of the chilling first part of the album, the perfect interlude.

The two highlights are yet to come: Highlow and Another Green Airport. Highlow is pretty holocaustic after a while with the bubbling acid line that comes in, it kind of reminds me of the Belgian Re-load sound from the mid-nineties, it`s very unlike to hear such a tune on FAX, yet it shows again how versatile the FAX-label is. The final chapter, Another Green Airport is a very minimalistic and tragic piece of ambient, the title is – IMO – based on Brian Eno`s output as it sounds like it could have been produced by Eno: think of Music For Airports very haunting and emotional and the perfect end for this incredible trip.

One of the less hard-to-find and rather cheap CD`s on FAX but an extremely good one.