A SAFE PLACE TO PLAY
Label: Milled Pavement Records
Catalog#: MP014
Nostalgia in music is often dismissed as a cheap sentiment; a ploy to engage listeners in their own memory, reaping the benefits of association but bereft of context outside what it conjures. Eric St. Pierre’s Late Night Clouds Project turns memory on its side with wistfulness for future days passed, much like an ancient sonic relic from an advanced alien civilization. With layered, warm tones sustaining endlessly across space/time dusted with crackly, wizened samples and snatches of skittering rhythms, St. Pierre effortlessly elicits a yearning for something worlds apart from the cloying new-ageyness of most ambient/downtempo music, something much more vast and humbling.
On Late Night Clouds Project’s first Milled Pavement release, A Safe Place to Play, St. Pierre often equates child-like innocence, as on the lysergic, Mr. Rogers-sampling title track, with a more cosmic type of wonderment. The rushing aural vortices that occasionally push to the fore reveal a fascination with the penultimate moments preceding birth and death, and the feeling of passage is palpable. Mining the filmic depths of such pastoral electronic forebears as Boards of Canada and Ulrich Schnauss, one can’t help but be inundated with images of infinite expanse being traversed at both glacial and breakneck paces. This is clearly music of a grander scope than most.
Even though the human scale is shown to be infinitesimal in perspective to the universal, there is an enveloping warmth and reassurance underpinning it all, perhaps best summed up by one whom has pondered the cosmos nearly as much as St. Pierre, Carl Sagan: “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”
01. Seagrass
02. The New West
03. Flutes To Soup
04. The Giffnock Hum
05. In Flight
06. It’s So Good
07. Beautiful Accidents
08. A Safe Place To Play
09. Mouse in a Biscuit Tin
10. Waiting For an Astroid
11. Akward
All songs written, produced & mixed by: Eric St. Pierre.
Mastered by: j.hjort, Chris Burns & Eric St. Pierre.
Photography by: Eric St. Pierre.
Graphic design & layout by: Mount Sinai Design.
Recorded in Glasgow, Scotland in 2007.
