RAPOON: Time Frost

Release year: 2007/2023
Label: Glacial Movements/Zoharum

Talk about a misleading album. The first four tracks on Time Frost are in the passable range of about six minutes – here I was thinking I had finally on my hands an ambient album with sensible track lengths. And then comes along Ice Whispers, the last track, lasting for a whopping 28 minutes. That’s three minutes longer than the other tracks combined. So much for sensible track lengths.

Yes, we’re back with Zoharum’s recent slew of ambient releases, the last one of them. This time it’s a re-release of UK act Rapoon’s 2007 album. And it’s a very topical album almost 20 years on, dealing as it does with climate change and the possibility of it triggering a new ice age.

The glacial themes are mirrored in the cold, soaring and sweeping synths which eschew almost all lower end for a crisp, even crystalline higher tone. The waves of droning and humming synthesizer layers truly sound icy. Like sound echoing in caverns of ice, or a wind sweeping across a frozen plain, or the impenetrable sheets of heavy snowfall.

But it’s still very much ambient music: abstract, formless, lacking conventional compositional structure. There’s not very much to fixate upon here; the waves of sound wash ashore and roll back slowly, without hooks to fixate upon. Compared to, for example, Uhushuhu’s album from the same batch of releases (reviewed here), this offers far less of anything the listener can latch on to.

But for the most part, Rapoon do this kind of ambient, understated abstraction well. Whilst the thematics of the album are even somewhat eschatological, Rapoon finds not gloom and dejection in this new age, but a weird sort of tranquillity and serenity. In this ambient soundscape to an icy cataclysm, it is not only the earth that becomes frozen, but time itself: Time Frost rings with the echoes of civilizations and their creations trapped under ice and frozen in time, almost like a note left hanging in the air for perpetuity.

There’s a contemplative nature to Time Frost, which enthralls the listener. Musically, Time Frost may not hold much that demands concentrated listening, but somehow, as the waves of sound wash ashore in the listener’s mind, it makes one muse. And visualize. Of the beauty of eternal winter, the comfort of life lying dormant in ice. Time Frost is captivating on an entirely other level.

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