Transatlantic postal services suck. Especially when you eagerly wait for a package that is supposed to come. It is definitively not the first time that a package got lost in the mail for me, but, when it is something such as the Anduin release on SMTG, it does hurt more than if was just some random items ordered from amazon.
Anyways, luckily enough,there was at least the digital version of the release to keep me company. And a good company it is. At first I was expecting some synthesizer drone album of the variety that is quite popular these days. But a couple of minutes in, "Stolen Years" revealed that there was so much more to be discovered. Sure, there are your monochromatic layers of sound, actually pretty good ones too, but the record has its strong points beyond that. The way Anduin plays with rhythm is absolutely great. From tiny blips and clicks that flutter around to actual beats, the whole piece seems to be a quietly pulsating machine contracting and expanding to the ebb and flow of the music. Especially since the beats and percussions sometimes seemed to be made out of field recordings such as in "Dyadic Twenty Seven" they emphasize the organic feel of the tracks even further.
Above all that wanders a freely moving saxophone, sometimes just as a glimpse of sound in the background, sometimes as a solo instrument giving the track more direction and moving it more into the psych improv field, but without the murkiness and the fuzz of that genre. Sometimes those saxophone lines seem to venture off into cheesy mid 80s pop, where Rafferty meets Toto meets late Jean Michel Jarre. Nevertheless, the saxophone never takes up too much attention leaving enough room for the track to breath, so that in the end Stolen Years maintains to be a slowly gliding, ethereal piece of ambient music. A record that shouldn't be missed.