Walking Through Fireflies
A soft requiem for a friend: Holloway's work has taken a turn.
Sadness and sorrow are no prerequisits for art, but they can certainly stimulate creative processes. Neil Young tried coping with the deaths of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry on the horrifically beautiful "Tonight's the Night", an album that translated numbness and the inability to speak into a universal sentiment. For Ian Holloway, too, loss has been at the centre of his most recent output. "Walking through Fireflies" is a tribute to his friend Vic Golightly, who died of cancer last year. It has turned out a soft requiem and his most personal album to date.
The motivation for the album also explains why Holloway has dropped his Psychic Space Invasion pseudonym this time. When he speaks of Golightly, he does so with tenderness and with the memories still fresh: "Just being around him made me smile" - a work like this knows no distance.
The music, too, has taken a turn and even though the PSI handwriting is still all over the place, there are a couple of tracks which step outside of what we have come to expect and tread new ground. The appropriately titled "New Season", for example, with its circular chord scheme played by a detuned and delayed piano. Or the closing "Sunnyshine", a gaping black hole of dark breathings, spaceous hiss and depressed melodies. The rhythmic aspect of "Pendulum", his previous release, has all but disappeared, even though the mysterious flutter within his drones has remained, this notion of inner agitation.
Most of the tracks are no longer driven by minute development, but rather by swelling and decaying sheets of sound, as well as the stretches of near-silence which seperate them from each other. The radio scramble-like noise collage, "A lighter Being" is a noticeable exception. But it's merely a short moment of concreteness, before the blackened pads, distorted and downwardly transposed vocal samples and the metronomic curve of loudness and quietude return.
Towards the end, the pieces get longer, epically contorted and more disturbing. Needly hands are tearing at the "Tower of Winds", as if the transmission were being coded, before the aforementioned "Sunnyshine" closes the door. Somehow, though, the experience is not all darkness, but rather a sort of woeful, yet releiving way of saying goodbye.
Holloway always finds the light and the will to carry on in his music and there is something solemn and strenghening in it, despite its sad and sorrowful connotations. There is a strong transformational character to "Walking through Fireflies" – one we can all experience. - Tobias Fischer, Tokafi
The Elvis Coffee Records label is no more and it's now moved on to be Quiet World and the first release is by Ian Holloway. Another move, since before he called himself Psychic Invasion, but with the new label name also a change of his own project. Music wise there has been not much change, I think. Holloway, as before with his Psychic Invasion, plays a fine set of dark atmospheric music. Using something that sounds like synthesizers (but they might very well be coming from the computer), field recordings, guitars and loads of sound effects, Holloway created seven pieces that sound quite different from eachother, and not throughout the same. 'A Lighter Being' has not much to do with drone music per se, and quite an improvised feel to it (and it's not the greatest moment here). Other pieces are more quiet and drone like and are just better. A pretty varied and throughout fine release. - FdW, Vital
Darren Tate has recently collaborated with Ian Holloway on "The Moon As A Hole" project, and Ian has just released his latest solo album "Walking Through Fireflies", another slow-moving drone collection that is beautifully realised with the sounds blending into a delightful whole. Featuring seven tracks the music ranges from barely moving low end whispers to more abstract soundscapes such as "A Lighter Being", the sounds shimmering and evaporating like a heat haze. Whilst there is a wider palette, the album has a conformity of purpose that pulls it together creating a warm and deeply enjoyable collection. - Simon Lewis, Rumbles
holloway's release using his own name, comes after quite a few years of recording as psychic space invasion. in the accompanying notes that were sent to me, it was said that a close friend of ian's, vic golightly, passed away from cancer, and that this disc was a tribute to his memory. obviously, releasing it under his own name would make the album significantly more personal.
i love what ian said about his psi project on its myspace, "ambient music that seeks to be an integral part of the listeners environment and not merely a soporific". while i had to look up that last five dollar word, i knew even without definition what he was talking about: ambient music that craves attentiveness. that's a tall order for a lot of musicians, at least it seems that way, but ian shows that he can walk the walk (ack, a pun, fuck me.. ) with this disc. i'd credit his lack of relying on unwavering, repetitious drones for his success. the music is layered well, with great panning in areas (specifically, a lighter being) and the inclusion of organic instrumentation, like the piano, add depth to the music.
throughout this cd, holloway does a good job of combining traditional ambient music (i.e. light, spacey synth drones) with elements that make me think of beat-less minimal techno. a lighter being and tower of winds are the best examples of this meshing. it comes across more so in the background textures and sounds that they use. you could use words like cold and dark to describe ian's music, i guess, but even then i feel like too much would get lost in the translation. while walking through fireflies serves as a memorial to vic, don't let that sway you into thinking that it's filled to the brim with plaintive sounds. that's not the case. ian started working on the album prior to his friend's passing; the music wasn't influenced by it.
with fireflies, ian's put together an album of minimal electronic music that any fans of the genre would be very pleased with. for me, i don't really listen to too many things that sound like this, but even i enjoyed listening to it. it provided some great mood music for this lovely overcast day we're having right now. - avant gardening, Smooth Assailing
There are records that just don't ask for more than their sheer existence, and that people play hundreds of times without any real reason, simply content of keeping them functioning in that fragment of time in which they're enjoyed. Ian Holloway's "Walking through fireflies" is one of these items. This music's constituents are few and not necessarily new: familiar-sounding low frequencies (probably deriving from synthesizers), processed guitars, piano, altered voices (I'm not fond of the latter, but Holloway being a serious man I'll gladly accept this, too) and, whenever a melody appears, it's extremely simple, slow, almost uncertain. This would seem to depict a customary darkish ambient outing, one of the dozens that visit my CD player once, then will be forgotten until I die. Not so, as this album gains its strength when we insert its unassuming tranquillity amidst the regular activities, especially if the weather allows us to leave windows open. Yes, I'm aware that I keep repeating this advice in too many occasions. Still, take advantage of quietness when you have a chance: barely hinted keyboard clusters and echoing resonant waves can work wonders together with the hiss of the wind, a distant barking dog or the faraway cars accelerating for a quicker return to home. Everything seems to fall in place, our soul finally distracted from preoccupations but, at the same time, conscious that another difficult tomorrow is knocking at the door. We all know that music (meaning the essential vibration, not Mozart or Madonna) is not what prevents mankind from getting nerve-wrecked; unfortunately, this depends on the absence of an actual cerebral evolution, because instead it could. Working on such a subliminal level, this stuff goes well beyond the surface of a distract judgement. Remember: whispering volume in a peaceful environment, otherwise it won't help. - Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
Normally, Ian Holloway records under the name of Psychic Space Invasion, but for this release, actually the first official Quiet World release, he uses his own name. This is, in a way, appropriate, for Walking Through Fireflies is quite different from the PSI releases so far; both more dark and more personal, I feel. It is dedicated to Vic Golightly, a deceased friend, and a lot of feeling went into this tribute.
All the same, this Welsh artist stays within his genre: dark drones and ambiences. And as always, he knows what he's doing. The tracks on this album are quite minimalistic, making use of sparse settings of synth waves, slow melodies, occasional samples, and the like. It's a slowly drifting series of bleak sounds, suitable for dark and rainy days like the ones we're having now right here.
The major parts of the album crawls along in this fashion, and though it's atmospheric, I don't find it as exciting as some of Ian's other works. This changes in the last two tracks though, which are more than excellent. "Tower of Winds" is one of the darkest ambient tracks I've heard in a while, with a solid, low droning base, and layered effects providing the melody. It's hard to describe, but this is one hell of a track: scary, oppressive, heavy. Equally impressive is "Sunnyshine", a deceiving name if there ever was one. No happy-happy-joy-joy here, but just one gloomy mass of melancholic synth waves.
So, while the first part of the album is OK, but not incredible, the last two tracks surely make up for that. As a whole, this album is a bleak exercise in ambient electronics, and it shows some of the more darker sides of the expression of mourning - a fitting tribute for a lost friend, in any case. This is a recommended album for drone and dark ambient enthusiasts, and another well done release by Holloway. A good start for Quiet World. - Oscar, Evening of Light
