Our dear friends at Lost Tribe Sound have on offer an ambient album perfectly designed for headphone listening by a project new to me called Drawing Virtual Gardens, a Belgium-based artist called David Gutman. From the promo material, which does a wonderful service introducing David’s work:
“At the core of Drawing Virtual Gardens ’22:22,’ there is a keen sense of the nocturnal, and a blurring of lines between the waking and the dream state. Focusing on small synchronous events within these hypnagogic periods, Gutman takes inspiration and translates them into musical cadence. Blankets of dense sub-bass coat minimal dub-like rhythmic structures. Warm flickers of guitar form brief conversations before seceding to the thick low-end percussions. Elsewhere, muted horns cascade into the recesses lending a weary jazz-like quality, or mimicking a less exotic type of fourth world sound.
While the similarities to fourth world brass are less evident on ’22:22,’ it was the decadent combination of melting trumpet lines and sub-bass that first drew our attention to the works of Drawing Virtual Gardens. Coming in the form of the 2021 release ‘~logues’ for Shimmering Moods, an album which we described as, “Massive earth-churning basslines crawl erratically through uneasy layers of mechanical interruptions, distance guitar, and gaseous noir-style trumpet. Just enough luminance creeps into the music to keep these dreamscapes from turning sour. Opaque. Unsettling. Oddly comforting.”
As for the album at hand, 22:22 is an hour that continuously intrigued Gutman. He began noticing it was a common occurrence to reference his watch at this exact hour during the night. His curiosity grew as he wondered what unexplained consciousness kept pointing him towards this time. The lore surrounding 22:22 is steeped with symbolism, reference to angels, tarot, the Kabbalah, and numerology. The general consensus points towards a positive and aware mind, in tune with the energies surrounding them: able to keep the channels open and tap into that brilliant force.”
