Slow Dance on Moss Beds is the new album by Belgian ambient and drone artist ‘t Geruis. The fifth release on Lost Tribe Sound‘s Salt and Gravity series, which kicked off last year with The Rise and Fall of the Melting World by Arrowounds, the release proves an excellent addition to the label’s unflinchingly distinctive roster. As the title suggests, Slow Dance on Moss Beds is a record concerned with nature and our human place within it. One which unfolds with almost limitless patience, as if operating to timescales of a magnitude entirely different to our own, the songs emanating from the ground like the wise and mournful voice of an ancient forest or peatland.
And this effect is no accident. Translated from Dutch, ‘t Geruis means “the noise” or “the murmur,” and everything the project does is an attempt to capture and explore those intangible sounds and feelings that we all experience but cannot elucidate. Those often fleeting but undeniable sensations that sit right in the texture of things—like the joy of spring sunlight or the sadness ingrained a cool autumn breeze.
The music is therefore as much about listening as it is about creating. About immersion in the rhythm and lyricism that’s all around us, waiting to be heard. “Music hides when we are not looking for it,” he describes. “There are very many found melodies in these pieces, a gift from trees, wind, machines and people. A fluttering piece of music we could easily miss.” ‘t Geruis draws on these melodies directly, utilising the natural world almost as another suite of instruments, weaving recordings of animals and plant life and weather events in alongside deteriorating drone loops and sombre piano. The birdsong of ‘langoureuse’, the honking geese of ‘gracieux’, even the ghostly echoed wails of ‘verzengend’, all sounds that surround us but are often obscured by our human noise.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=1436182496 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=3428237800]
The overall feeling is hard to describe accurately. There is a sense of melancholy, yes, but melancholy as the close cousin of nostalgia, of inspiration. There is something affirming about Slow Dance on Moss Beds that is strangely familiar yet impossible to put into words. In the same way a painting can be more evocative than a high definition photograph, the album captures not the world we “see” everyday but one we feel when we take the time or when conditions align just so. See how ‘iets kostbaars’ (tr. “something precious”) sounds gentle and pastoral, like soft sunbeams on rolling hills, or how ‘entre les arbres’ captures that almost tactile non-silence of a quiet forest. The murmur is always present, always calling, and thanks to ‘t Geruis we can take the time to stop and listen.
Slow Dance on Moss Beds is out now via Lost Tribe Sound and you can get it from the ‘t Geruis Bandcamp page. For discounts on all the albums on CD or digital, you can also subscribe to the Salt and Gravity Series via the Lost Tribe Sound Bandcamp page.
