Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 12:09PM 
Fabric - A Sort of Radiance Reviews
The Wire, April 2010
"It is also pretty brilliantly executed: while all of the pieces are essentially built upon lush swells of slowly unfolding chord progressions, there is an enormous amount of vibrant activity surrounding them. Pieces like "High Ceilings" and "Light Float" burble, quaver, swoop, and shimmer to a transfixing degree. (...) Matthew also has an impressive talent for mood and subtlety, allowing just enough melody to give the songs color and personality, but never being blunt enough to disrupt the lazily warm and hallucinatory flow of the album."
"The songs are hardly linear, either, and tend to blossom in all directions, with an at times overwhelming number of synthesizer treatments under the same roof; on “Camera,” up to five different synth lines spiral and swirl around each other like smoke trails. Thankfully, Mullane’s spatial sense is adept, allowing the mix just enough breathing room, and the ever-changing nature of these songs reveal new and interesting aspects, on each listen. In turn, space (and perhaps to a greater extent, anxiety) translates into thematic concern here, with tracks like “Leaving The House,” “High Ceilings” and “Containers” suggesting crippling phobias, even OCD. This uneasiness plays into the album’s undeniably dark tone, especially on the send-off “Soft Disconnect” — perfect music for dystopian noir sci-fi."
"There’s a certain Boards of Canada hopefulness in ‘Leaving the House’, all sky-bound synths, burbling satellites, arpeggiating arpeggios and pulsing drones. ‘Light Float’ reminds me of the proto-Kraftwerk outfit Organisation, with their Tone Float, maybe just in title, but it definitely sparkles and swells like a beach on a moonlit night. Vignettes like ‘High Ceilings’ and ‘Controls’, despite their relative brevity, deliver more punch and angles than the longer pieces, and act as a transition between them. An engaging ambient album from Matthew Mullane, I look forward to seeing where he takes this sound in future outings."
"Spectrum Spools seems to be a new off-shoot from Editions Mego, and I couldn't find what it was all about actually. Behind Fabric is Matthew Mullane from Chicago. He plays synthesizers, although none such is mentioned. And Spectrum Spools is also very clever not to brand the music in anyway (no 'file under' here), but the music is all about cosmic synthesizers. Lots of arpeggios wailing about, with a faint trace of rhythm underneath. Like I said, ambient house may do a return. Apparently people are fed up with loud stomping music and return to glitchy beats and analogue synthesizers. No glitchy beats for Fabric however, as this is mostly synthesizer heavy. Drawn heavily from the songbook of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, mid to late seventies. No epic, side-long pieces but somewhat shorter, and highly minimal and melodic. Its music I like actually, very much. A fine work to launch a new label!"
"Hajduch: I think the two greatest strengths of the album are tone (thick, de-tuned, layered swells competing with brittle lead lines) and melody (a pop sensibility akin to a beat-less Boards of Canada). And much like BoC, the tracks run from long meditations to short vignettes. I agree that it helps the rhythm of the album, as does the dynamic nature of the longer pieces. Though they're not technical prog journeys, they rarely sound at the end as they do at the beginning.
In the end, my favorite song here is the two-minute "Controls," a simple three-chord segue between two of the album's longest tracks. It breaks the longer drone pieces up with a simple circular melody and serves as a perfect example of everything I like about A Sort of Radiance."
"With that and its title in mind, A Sort of Radiance displays the kind of ambient wondrance that you might expect. A delight for fans of kosmische and new age ambience old and recent, Mullane crafts an array of synth/computer atmospheres, of varying length, texture and density across the LP."
"Given that he is clearly such a deep thinker about music, the depth of this work comes as no surprise. Like the Bee Mask release, it begins with chunks of noise, but this time it is what sounds like traffic noise, signifying the beginning of some sort of journey – inevitably, a journey through time as much as anything else. On a piece like the epic ‘Light Float’, he adds layer upon layer, element after element, shaking them to creating a complex, colourful, suspension, the patterns of which you could study for hours, and always find something new – or indeed something old"
"Mullane comes packing a collection of beautifully layered synth workouts that are equally light and buoyant, dark and ominous, and, of course, cosmic as hell. But where Mullane excels is in his melodies. Always pleasing and easy on the ears, they make the album go down effortlessly. And even if A Sort of Radiance does have its fair share of gloomy undertones, Mullane has made this record come across as a very personal and emotional one, which is no easy feat for an entirely instrumental electronic artist, no matter the vintage."
