Various Artists - Enjoy The Silence Review

Tokyo's Mule Musiq has been quietly churning out experimental electronic music to discerning ears for five years now. To mark the anniversary, label founder Toshiya Kawasaki championed Enjoy the Silence Vol. 1, a 12-track ambient compilation. With exclusive tracks from some electronic music heavyweights, the album will be an introduction to Mule for many non-Japanese listeners.



Enjoy the Silence is an apt title for music that is, indeed, often just a few decibels away from silence. Featherweight tones and wide open spaces fill up the 70-plus minutes on the album, with drum and bass nearly nonexistent. (Think ambient in the realm of late 1970s Brian Eno.) However, just as great hip-hop is more than killer beats, great ambient is more than soft atmospherics.



Electronic music heavyweights DJ Koze, Lawrence, and DJ Sprinkles aren't primarily known for their ambient releases, so the incongruity adds to the improvisatory attitude on the album. DJ Sprinkles' "Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own," reminisces on the golden age of the New York house scene. It sounded wonderful on his release, Midtown 120 Blues, but it feels out of place on Enjoy the Silence.

...full text With the success of Kompakt's seminal Pop Ambient series and renewed interest in ambient's soothing, breakfast-in-bed charms, several dance labels are now trying their hands at electronic music's fleecier side. Following Innervisions' excellent Muting the Noise last year comes Japanese label Mule Electronic's Enjoy the Silence. Having forged a niche for itself over the last five years as Mule Musiq's contemplative star-watcher's sibling with standout releases from mainstays like Minilogue, Lawrence and DJ Sprinkles, the label often works the downier, ambient-house turf of labels like Traum and liebe*detail. Released to celebrate the label's fifth anniversary, Enjoy the Silence, then, is a pretty natural distillation of that sound taken to its softest extremes.

A quick peek at the tracklist reveals not only an A-list set of Mule's past contributors but of modern dance music heavies in general. Minilogue devoted roughly half of their debut full-length Animals last year to ambient music, so it shouldn't surprise that their "In the Smoke We All Became Birds" is one of the collection's highlights. Following an intro of hazy, swirling drones and dim, distant bird trills, the Swedish duo clear the air a little bit, grounding it with stuttering, serpentine rhythmic effects and an eerie sample of a tribal call like a forest yodel. Hamburg's Benjamin Brunn turns in another stellar creation of spacious, sputtering house with "Approaching India"—quiet twitchy bits of static and a sitar struck in rhythmic twanging intervals—while former Orb member and 3MBer Thomas Fehlmann's "Scheben" sounds almost queasy and seasick, his thick symphonics layered beneath a surface film of piano pings and drone ripples....full text No, it's not a Depeche Mode tribute. It's a compilation from the Japanese ambient label, Mule Electronic....full text