Sister Loolomie - Signals

Sister Loolomie
"Signals"

CD-R (ltd. 250)
ZHB-XX


1. No Final Decision Here [mp3]
2. About Corpuscles
3. Prelude and Part about Pink Dream [mp3]
4. Sleep Before the Alarm
5. Light and Cold [mp3]

total length: 48:54
release date: November 02, 2009
price: €7

* bandcamp.com
* all.semperflorens.net

Sister Loolomie is one of the offspring of [S]ergey (or just [S]), a musician from Moscow region, known for his projects Exit In Grey, Five Elements Music and some others, as well as for his labels Still*Sleep and Semperflorens. The musical style of [S] is notable for its delicate and gentle approach to sound, the keywords for its definition are: ambient / drone / experimental / electroacoustic. In Sister Loolomie [S] utilizes deliberate sonic "digitalizing" and at the same time manages to keep the warmth and cosiness of sound in his own way, resembling tape drone music.

[S]ergey uses guitar, electronics, radio and computer processing in creating his soundscapes, both abstract and sensuous at the same time. The compositions move calmly and slowly, sound loops draw in attention like spirals and dissolve it in their textures. Shivery signal waves and soft generated rasp form an aerial atmosphere, in which crackle the discharges of digital interference, and bright yet slightly melancholic melodies bring serenity and tender contemplative sadness.



Reviews

Sergey is the man behind Sister Loolomie. He's also responsible for the music of Five Elements Music, Exit In Grey and his labels Still*Sleep and Semperflorens. This I believe is his second release as Sister Loolomie. Much of his music deals with the almighty drone, and as Sister Loolomie it is not different. However there is one major difference, and that is that here he uses only digital means. For one reason or the other, this album was already recorded in 2004, but only finished this year. At his disposal are a guitar, electronics, radio and all of that goes into the computer for some further processing. Distinctly digital it is. Sergey down-samples the material into a gritty, grainy sound, using many loops that phase shift around. Its not the world of dreamy drones, but that of angular electronics. Not really warm glitch music, there is however something captivating about this work. The sheer minimalism of revolving dark, grey sounds make this is into a great album.

Sister Loolomie is the project by one of Russian electronic underground representatives, musician Sergey [S]. In album Signals he creates big, voluminous pools of electronic ambient with changing deepness - at the beginning of the next of 5 tracks we are deepened up to knees, up to the end developed by him audio substance drags you away totally. Ambient, drone, reverberation - this is a common set of scene fans, general misty atmosphere and mood of deep penetration into dense mental layers. Modest, simple melodies develop emotional side of the record giving shape to the stripes of audio design. Quite habitual for style, destructive bitcrush went over the sound, accurately like with a brush, making the texture of sound surface brighter and rougher, adding to extensive compositions aesthetics of digital noise effects. Breaking, scratching and mixing of sounds layers is a very fascinating business. That's extremely well when you manage to do it the way when not only the author of music likes it, but also a small group of people who are ready to buy very limited edition of CDr with album which came out. I think that each person of them will find in signals of Sister Loolomie his own warm, cozy cosmos and will be maybe not surprised but fully satisfied with pleasant home music.

pi micron, Sound Proector.

[...] We have before us five new (and slow) instrumentals from a Moscow collective working together with a label whose very name speaks clearly to the traditions of industrial music. In Russia, however, especially at the start of the 21st century, the noun “industry” has a rather melancholy overtone. It no longer refers to large, nationwide processes of goal-driven construction, but instead to the effort(s) involved in a qualitatively different type of activity. For the one or two members of Sister Loolomie, work is better directed away from places marked by asphalt and anxiety. Rejecting any notions of sociopolitical permanence, they find instead a more “comfortable” and consoling sense of lasting membership in the sounds of places that existed before Moscow even took shape.

[...] Sister Loolomie’s hometown offer many opportunities – at a minimal distance – to walk away from modernity against the backdrop of “hypnotizing field-recordings of city and nature.” That same sense of hypnosis, mirrored in the “whirlpool” of sounds we have here, emerges thanks to the repetitious cycles of the natural world or “enduring elements of nostalgia.” [...] It is, in a word, an enduring state, replete with all manner of comforting, consoling, and meditative “signals” that have outlasted even the loudest declaration from downtown.

David MacFadyen, Far From Moscow.

[...] The first time I put Sister Loolomie in my player, the first track?s abstract eletric ambient made me think of Radio 1940-era Wilt; the soundscaped of old electronic equipment. This is what I expected the whole album to be, but with subsequent tracks it reveals new sides: first harmonic atmospheres in the vein of Alio Die, then ever grander melodic arches reminiscent of Aidan Baker. A tape-like sound combined with electric signals and warm atmosphere make this a very beatiful and coherent piece - to such an extent I realized I have been listening to this daily for the past week.

A record that started out "nice" revealed itself to be a really positive suprise. Very beautiful drone music.

[...] ‘Signals’ starts with ‘No Final Decision Here’, which is a long soundscape of almost 14 minutes of processed sounds and drones. On the outside the sounds are very minimal, but when you listen to it with headphones all kinds of sub-layers are heard to transform the song into a micro-cosmos within itself and thus becomes very immersive. ‘About Corpuscles’ is a very beautiful and somewhat glitchy soundscape. It has some crackling filtering like we are listening to a vinyl recording. ‘Prelude And Part About Pink Dream’ also uses some beautiful and soothing sounds, amidst glithy elements. It ends in a quite intense and noisy glitch work. ‘Sleep Before The Alarm’ uses buzzing drones and has a somewhat darker undercurrent. The album climaxes with ‘Light And Cold’. The duality of the song title is also represented in the song itself, as it uses light and warm melodies with colder and clinical sound layers.

An interesting recording. Sister Loolomie uses ambient glitch with some very beautiful melodic and soothing sounds to create a somewhat dualistic sound palette. ‘Signals’ is a recording you can dive into and find new meaning time and time again. A very good and interesting ambient release.

Fabian, Gothtronic.

Sister Loolomie is a Russian project that I’ve just heard for the very first time. It’s a side-project from an Exit In Grey-member (this project is also unknown to me). Sister Loolomie has already released several cdr’s and “Signals” is just one more on the list. This album brings a fascination for signal waves resulting in quite monotonous soundscapes. It creates an ambient impression in the early beginning, but rapidly moves into long during wave sounds. It all might remind you of some legendary experiments released on Staalplaat. Despite of this comparison (and reference as well) “Signals” didn’t catch my attention at any single moment. This is an extreme minimalist release that will be only tasted by a very restricted number of people. The album has been limited to 250 copies, which clearly indicates the expectation. I’ve now heard several releases from Zhelezobeton, but this one is the single one lacking the depths!

When the classic horror film The Blob hit theaters back in 1958, one of the taglines for the movie was “Run, don’t walk, from The Blob!” Now, within the context of The Blob, this line was referring to a globular alien that was eating everything in its path, but the advice applies here as well.

If you ever find yourself in even the general vicinity of anywhere that Sister Loolomie’s album Signals is being played, run away. Fast.

With Signals, I honestly can find nothing positive to say.

From beginning to end, Signals is an absolute disaster. When the first track, “No Final Decision Here,” starts out with a low, almost throbbing noise and proceeds to add in a whining akin to a dulled version of the sound made when a microphone gets too close to a speaker, a feeling of curiosity is elicited. Where is this “song” going? Nowhere good, unfortunately.

This ear-grating combination of sounds drags on for an excruciating 13 minutes and 54 seconds. The original curiosity about the style of “music” dies out after the first minute, leaving the listener hoping for the end to come soon. When it finally does, things don’t get any better.

The second track has a much higher pitch to it, which is actually welcome after the persistent drone of the first track but, like “No Final Decision Here,” that pitch is essentially created by one note being held for the full ten minutes of the track. Add to this the fact that there’s a consistent static in the background—which I’m assuming is intentional, since that crackling is present nowhere else on the album—and “About Corpuscles” is as unpleasant a listening experience as the track before it.

The overall vibe of Signals is something along the lines of alien bees—droning, with a structure that does not sound like anything created on this planet, and it’s not enjoyable to those of us who live here. It really sounds like the type of music that would be played during a scene of alien abduction/experimentation in a sci-fi movie.

Sister Loolomie’s Signals is an album that can be summed up with one word: bizarre. Perhaps if you’re looking to put yourself into a trance, or return to the Mother Ship, this album might have some appeal. But if that’s not the case, I’d recommend staying away from Signals.

Carly Doenges, MuzikReviews.com.

Sister Loolomie is yet another project from Sergey Suhovik, the Muscovite mood engineer who has graced us with luminous drones via his other pseudonyms / projects Five Elements Music and Exit In Grey. Signals is our first exposure to Sister Loolomie, which appears to be hedging more toward a '60s computer music / radiophonic feel. Compositionally, Sergey maintains the cyclical patterns of shimmer and drone found in those other projects we've long championed; but the tools, instruments, and sounds seem to be of another origin. Several of the tracks add a ring modulated / sawtoothed grit to his source material, which immediately leads to the impression that Sergey has dug up some obsolete piece of telemetry / signaling technology from the cold war era, extracting a warm, fizzing, pixelated graininess from this imagined piece of equipment. And at other times, he posits warmer tones of bitcrushed suspension, rasping half-melodies, and sunblind mirages which has us thinking of those latter day Lovesliescrushing recapitulations of lost-then-found tapes.

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