Premonition Factory  is the name of the ambient-electronic music project by Sjaak Overgaauw, a dutch musician currently living in Antwerp, Belgium. ‘The Sense of Time’ is his second full CD, the follow up to 2010’s ’59 Airplanes waiting for New York’. It contains eleven tracks of different length, presenting an impressive hour of well balanced immersive ambient sounds. Most are ‘classic’ ambient: slow washes of drones, sparsely interspersed with background electrics – a very peaceful sound overall.

From the sound of this album one would guess that these tracks were created using a lot of multitrack layers, but in fact the opposite is true: these recordings all come from live improvisational sets, recorded directly to 2-track! Because of this, Premonition Factory is sometimes compared to Dirk Serries’  recordings as Vidna Obmana/Fear Falls Burning, although there is some difference in sound since Premonition Factory is built from keyboard synth sounds instead of from guitars. With Premonition Factory, Sjaak Overgaauw has obviously found the style that suits him best, and therefore does not need to feel the urge of breaking down barriers or experiment just for the sake of experimenting.

Like its title suggests, this album does what a good ambient music album should do: it makes you lose your ‘Sense of Time ‘. The physical version is released as a beautiful 6-panel digipack (available through Bandcamp, also including the digital download) – but if digital is enough for you you can download it from major digital download outlets such as iTunes , eMusic  and Amazon.

Date: March 19,2011 by Peter van Cooten