Guentner | Spieth ~ Overlay

Fans of Kompakt’s long-running Pop Ambient series will recognize the names Markus Guentner and Joachim Spieth. Between them, the two veterans of ambient and house music have appeared on more than half of the PA albums since they first began back in 2001, with Spieth providing the opening track, “You Don’t Fool Me,” to get the whole thing started. The 2022 PA release saw Guentner and Spieth collaborate for the first time on the beatless, looming, crepuscular track, “Kari.” Now the two artists come together again to embark on a series of collaborations with their first full-length album, Overlay, released on Spieth’s Affin label.

Before releasing the album, however, the duo dropped a preliminary single, “Prologue,” to serve as a kind of template for what’s to come. Why it’s not included on Overlay is a mystery.

The sound of “Prologue” is all mid-range and low-end, with nothing crisp or sparkling riding on top. Rising steadily from the darkness of its opening come swelling waves of lush pads that crest and only halfway subside before more waves come cascading in after them. For all its density, however, nothing on the track feels muddled or oblique. Guentner and Spieth conjure up a powerful oceanic force and make room for it to surge and bloom and rush in its brief, four-minute frame. It’s like a snapshot taken from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean – vast, chilling, and formidable, without a landmark in sight.

As for the album proper, the first track on Overlay, “Praeludium,” with its buried but resolute beat, announces a turn from things oceanic toward earthier territory. Shifting elements of sound – random spatters of dripping water, ASMR crackles and tumbling gushes – are layered among bright, heaving pads, creating an immersive, cavernous environment. The searching synth strings of the next track “Nukleus” build and build in a slow crescendo that rises endlessly without resolving – until the thunderblast and unrelenting, velvet-pile-driver-throb of “Valenz” shatters the yearning and pulls everything under in a heated embrace.

There are no “songs” on the album, only feverish storms that flare up and fill the horizon before fading away. “Scope” is wet with rain and battered by gusting winds while being driven forward by an unforgiving pulse. “Void,” like “Nukleus,” is a welter of synth strings reaching and straining in tumbling, braided layers, a track that churns and pounds and eventually collapses and fades in utter exhaustion. And the album closer, “Apastron,” is a mournful elegy of deep breaths, rippling with crackle and hiss while it thickens in gorgeous layers of pads and bass before returning to darkness.

Oozing with narcotized and eroticized romantic impulses, Overlay feels like a living revenant from a voluptuous dream. One hopes that Guentner and Spieth’s new series will give Pop Ambient a run for its money. In the meantime, play this one loud and feel it on your skin. (Damian Van Denburgh)