Premonition Factory

Category: 59 Airplanes waiting for New York

  • Futhernoise: Long live Premonition Factory

    Some years ago Dirk Serries pensioned off his Vidna Obmana project to invest his energies in Fear Falls Burning. Early on in 59 Airplanes Waiting for New York, the air of a strange familiar wafts through the ambiguous lulling loops of “Needless to Say Anything.” Liner notes ID-ing Serries as “album consultant” and on mastering, along with Premonition Factory’s Sjaak Overgaauw using a synthesizer fed through loop devices, all point to Obmana’s ghost and a mentor in the wings. No charges of derivation, though, more a positive proclamation: Vidna Obmana is dead, long live Premonition Factory.

    An organiser of Antwerp’s Live Looping Festival, Overgaauw is a leading light in the international looping community. He deploys “interactive live looping,” a continuous, cumulative exchange between spontaneous musicality and automated process. Tracks were edited out of extended improvisations, this aspect affording much of their distinction: no beginning, no ending, no development, no telos. Here, when a revenant motif surfaces, the process innards are glimpsed, while elsewhere all is colourform shapeshift and shadow drift. Thrumming chorales collide gently with tectonic drone plateshifts, as the Overgaauw method rolls out in spatial swells and fall-backs, neon-lit harmonies flickering against a dark-lit backdrop, spectral figures in low gravity fields.

    The set spools out in five pieces medium-length, one long-form, different moods and designs, the whole imbued with classic Ambient cadence. A minimal dynamic sensibility presides, the nocturnal of “To The Dark Place Where It Leads” shifting to the diurnal of “The Future Will Be Whatever We Make It”. The elegiac piano vapour trails of the title track trill out in a more maximal Music for Airports, edged by chthonic stirrings, before resolving to more iridescent timbres, between a deceptive dream lull and the phantom soundtrack to your headspace cinema. Back to Vidna, a kinetic of exhale-inhale reveals itself further on the closing “Only Birds Know Where to Fly”, which dips into pools of Kosmische and old school space music. 59 Airplanes  proves an incantatory swim in timbral waters whose dark undercurrents render it all the more inviting.

    Review by Alan Lockett
    Source: http://www.furthernoise.org/page.php?ID=368&iss=89

  • Sonomu.net

    Sjaak Overgaauw is a Belgian musician who only a year ago assumed the name Premonition Factory and launched his solo career. Nearly everything about this project is done with exquisite taste and the utmost care to detail, from the imaginative and suggestive monicker to the gorgeous packaging. (My only complaint is with the hackneyed track titles.)

    The easy way out is to state that Premonition Factory fills the gap left in ambient music since Dirk Serries abandoned his Vidna Obmana project, especially since the fellow-Belgian is listed as ”album consultant” in the liner notes. But though there are strong family resemblances, the music of 59 Airplanes Waiting for New York  proves that Overgaauw is entirely his own man.

    His only instrument is the synthesizer and he is adroit at coaxing a warm, wordless poetry out of the machine. Like the best, classically-defined ambient music, it scents the air rather than assaulting the senses. Like Serries, he is a master at delaying gratification, as the music seems to hover when it actually moves slowly, deliberately, reshaping as constantly and unpredictably as the clouds scudding across the sky. And like him, it seems strangely organic, it seems to breathe, particularly on ”The Future Will Be Whatever We Make It”.

    The title track is music for airports of almost symphonic proportions, as a piano melody wanders aimlessly to pass the time as waves of strings arch and stretch overhead. The long, closing track, “Only Birds Know Where to Fly”, seems to channel the earliest cosmic and ambient music; it sounds familiar, and analogue, though it is neither.

    Divided into six pieces, 59 Airplanes is still cut from whole cloth, resulting in an absorbing fifty minutes, engaging and enchanting but with a dark undercurrent lurking deep below its surface.

    Stephen Fruitman

    source: http://sonomu.net/text/~tbvozt/

  • Gonzo Circus

    Gonzo Circus

    Review by Gonzo Circus (July 2010)
    Source: Gonzo Circus magazine 98

    [Translated text] – The link between ambient and airports has been programmed in our collective memory since Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” [1978]. The beautiful and catchy title ” 59 Airplanes waiting for New York “ and the particular sound are breathing out the glory days of the first [Eno] and second ambient golf [Biosphere, The Orb, Sun Electric]. The CD contains six improvised compositions, all recorded in real-time, and they remind you of the classic, loop based ambient style of Klaus Schulze. This début is not exactly original, however the craftmanship and love for this kind of music makes you forget that at once. [premonitionfactory.com]

    [Original text] – Sinds Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ uit 1978  is het verband tussen ambient en luchthavens onherroepelijk in ons collectief geheugen geprogrammeerd. Met een (mooie en rake) titel als “59 Airplanes waiting for New York” en een geluid dat complexloos de hoogtijdagen oproept van de eerste [Eno] en tweede ambient golf [Biosphere, The Orb, Sun Electric], kan ook Premonition Factory (de Nederlandse Antwerpenaar Sjaak Overgaauw) niet verdoezelen uit welke kom hij zijn mosterd lepelde. De CD bestaat uit zes geïmproviseerde composities die, door het feit dat ze allemaal in real-time werden gespeeld, sterk doen denken aan de klassieke , loopgerichte ambient van Klaus Schulze. Origineel is dit debuut hoegenaamd niet, maar het geëtaleerde vakmanschap en de liefde voor dit soort muziek doen dat gebrek snel vergeten [premonitionfactory.com]

    Gonzo Circus

  • Electrospace Ambient

    Premonition Factory is Sjaak Overgaauw from Belgium, and his excellent debut CD is mastered by Dirk Serries aka vidnaObmana. This is delicate, sparse ambience is fresh and exciting, even as it soothes and relaxes. Every detail from the sonic clarity to the nuanced sounds to the gorgeous trifold digipak is expertly executed. Whether it is gently strummed notes to open the disc, the resonant drones of “Needless to Say Anything,” or the rumbling undercurrents of “To The Dark Place Where It Leads,” or the soft floating of “The Future Will Be Whatever We Make It,” every note seems carefully considered, purposefully planned, and yet it all flows by effortlessly. The title track features reverberating piano along the lines of Harold Budd, floating over a bed of edgy buzzes and soft static. A touch of the experimental and avant garde runs through the album, but it remains very listenable and thoroughly engaging throughout. Highly recommended.

    Review by Electrospaceambient (may-15-2010)

  • Utopian film-noir-orchestrals

    Composers are often regarded as little more than the sum of their influences.  As an organiser of the Antwerp Live Looping Festival, Overgaauw has been in close touch with the international looping community, which automatically puts his debut album under the Premonition Factory moniker in a long line of tradition. Dirk Serries of Vidna Obmana, Fear Falls Burning and Microphonics has acted as his creative mentor, suggesting links to Ambient and Minimalism. And one could easily imagine the Antwerp-based producer owning copies of Tangerine Dream’s early and mid-phase albums, Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s „The Pearl“ or some of Klaus Schulze’s more atmospheric works. Contacts and connections are plentiful, inspirations abound and as such, his debut could well have turned out nothing but a precisely realised amalgamation of everything he considers inspiring and important.

    „59 Airplanes waiting for New York“ now proves just how wrong that cynical view of the arts really is. Overgaauw has been frank about the importance of Serries, who also took on mastering duties in the later stages of the process. And yet, there are worlds between the latter’s first Microphonics-full-length and „59 Airplanes“ – and not just, because Overgaauw is making use of Synthesizers rather than a Guitar here. In comparison, the world of Premonition Factory is made of a considerably more colourful palette, as richly humming choir clusters softly crash into tectonically shifting drone-plates and metalically rattling dulcimers meet sweetly whirring fluorescence. Thematic lines are less complexly interwoven, shifts more openly traceable, textures less confoundingly convoluted, for- and background more clearly separated. In terms of sound, this is creating a spacious, calmly breathing, harmonious yet panoramically deep continuum of weightlessly moving elements.

    At the heart of this cosmic concoction is a compositional technique described by Overgaauw as „interactive live looping“, which can be summarised as a continuous, exponentially growing communication between performance and feedback, between spontaneous musicality and automated processes. At select moments, when a motive returns in a semitonally pitched appearance for example, one can actually detect the subtle workings of the process and the way it is underpinning the action. Most of the time, however, it is submerged into a floating mosaique of colours, shapes and shadows. „Interactive live looping“ encourages long solitary jam sessions, but Overgaauw places less importance on the act of building his soundscapes than on highlighting those exciting occurrences when a touch of magic suddenly takes over and formerly directionless ambiances melt together into a cogwheel-like machinery.

    The fact that these tracks were carefully edited out of extended improvisations is therefore not a compromise but exactly what awards them this floating, unreal quality: They don’t begin, they don’t end, they don’t develop in any traditional way and they don’t ever really go anywhere. Rather, they float along the paperway of a moebius strip, always in flux yet never really advancing. As a listener, you’re locked into these immersive spaces like an astronaut in orbit and it is a sensation of both great peace and humility at the sight at something indescribably more powerful than yourself.

    At just over 50 minutes, „59 Airplanes waiting for New York“ is anything but a nostalgic recourse to the far shorter durations of the Vinyl format and to what Steven Wilson called „the golden age of the album“. And yet, with its architecture of five medium-length pieces and one epic meditation as well as its organic oscillation between different moods and approaches, it oozes a classical feeling nonetheless. There is a strong sense of dynamics, as the album hums silently for almost ten minutes on the breathtakingly intense „Needless to Say Anything“, but intersperses the tranquil moods of „Only Birds know where to Fly“ with sparks of sizzling electricity.

    Overgaauw may be frank about the support he has received for this record, but his music speaks books about the ambitions hiding underneath. When the galactic hiss and solitary Piano droplets of the title track are suddenly washed over by synthetically shining cinematic strings, the pulse rate accelerates and what seemed to nothing but a dreamy Ambient track is transformed into a  utopian piece of film-noir-orchestrals. It is at this point, at the very latest, that one realises that his vision could never be reduced to the mere sum of his influences.

    By Tobias Fischer

    Source: http://www.tokafi.com/newsitems/premonition-factory-59-airplanes-waiting-new-york/

  • unruhr.de

    „59 airplanes waiting for new york“ ist das debüt von premonition factory. und hinter premonition factory steckt sjaak overgaauw, der auf eine mischung unterschiedlichster musikalischer begegnungen zurückschauen kann, als premonition factory hier jedoch zum ersten mal den alleingang wagt.

    allein heisst: er und seine keyboards. die er, und das ist für mich ein unterschied zu vielen anderen, heutigen keyboard-solo-akteuren, gar nicht so sehr nutzt, um über verschiedene sequenzer-programme seine tracks zu entwickeln. premonition factory arbeitet in einer art rudimentärer, grenzt bestimmte technische möglichkeiten bewusst aus und lässt sich von beschränkung inspirieren (und, das ruhig an dieser stelle, rückt dadurch entscheidend näher an die pure musik als technikaffinere kollegen): motive werden angedeutet, geloopt und in der konfrontation der wiederholung ausgearbeitet. das alles natürlich in einer live-im-studio situation, die ein gewisses maß an unvorhergesehener entwicklung fördert und, dank des verzichts auf nachträgliche korrektur, auch zulässt. zusammen mit einer haltung der ruhe in sich selbst entstehen so sich langsam entwickelnde ambient tracks, nicht zu hell ausgeleuchtet, aber auch in keiner weise dark/düster/bedrohlich (zumindest sollte das für die ohren derer gelten, die mit musik, die diese attribute ernsthaft verdient, vertraut sind).

    zweites wichtiges merkmal neben der eigenwilligeren kompositionsweise ist dieses analog-sound-gefühl, dass sich sofort beim ersten ton einstellt: ob und was hier tatsächlich mit analogen instrumenten entwickelt wurde, ist dabei allenfalls für konzeptpuristen von bedeutung; der glockig-warme klang allgemein, das sound-design innerhalb der stücke, das völlig ohne digitale überzuckerung arbeitet und die reduktion auf wenige, prägnante farben pro stück nehmen hörer und -in sofort ein.

    außerdem: die loopbasierte komposition und ihre konzeptbedingten wagnisse, das treffen der entscheidung, ob die aktuell aufgenommene version „DIE“ version ist, die letztlich auf die veröffentlichung soll, all das basiert auf und funktioniert nur wegen einer intensiven gefühlsverflechtung zwischen musik und macher. und das ist hörbar.

    schöne grüße
    N

    ps: aufklapppappschuber, no plastics got harmed… (außer die der CD…)

    Reviewed by: N
    Source: unruhr.de

  • Subtle ambient music

    59 Airplanes Waiting for New York is the debut album by Premonition Factory, the project of Sjaak Overgaauw, based in Antwerp. He self-released this album in a stylish digifile with modern design that reflects the care that went into the creation of the music as well. The album contains over 50 minutes of calm, reflective ambient based on improvised real-time looped synths.

    The six tracks on this album are drifting and open, and each has a strong voice and atmosphere of its own, with some emphasising a slightly darker and more reserved tone, like “Needless To Say Anything” and “To the Dark Places Where it Leads”. On the other hand, tracks like the first one are quite bright, light, and open. The title track is definitely one of the best, with its crystal clear production and gripping piano-based melodic structure, combined with soft background crackles. The last track is a very long one, ending the album gently and softly, floating away on clouds of sound.It should come as a recommendation that Dirk Serries mastered this album, besides acting as a consultant for it. While it is clear that Overgaauw has more than enough talent to craft his own delicate soundscapes, it never hurts to have some guidance from someone with decades of experience. In this case, it means the debut Premonition Factory album is immediately on a very high level in terms of production and sound. As such, it comes with a very strong recommendation for all lovers of dreamy and subtle ambient music.

    Reviewed by O.S.

    Review by Evening of Light (21-apr-2010)

  • Vital Weekly 725

    Its with much confidence that Sjaak Overgaauw, the man behind Premonition Factory and his new label Longstreet Records, releases this CD. He was a keyboard player and mixer in various projects, but only started to play music Premonition Factory in September 2009, and in February he released his first CD. That’s what I like: if you really believe in what you are doing, then you have to show it, so why not indeed release a CD straight away? What’s probably going to help him is the fact that the album is mastered by Dirk Serries, also known as Fear Falls Burning, Microphonics and Vidna Obmana. Especially the latter incarnation seems to me to have been an inspiration for Overgaauw. He uses one or more loop devices, through which he feeds his synthesizer and creates music that is similar to the work of Vidna Obmana. Dark. Atmospheric. Ambient. The keywords for this kind of music. One could easily argue that Vidna Obmana already made a strong point with that kind of music through an immense catalogue of works, and that Overgaauw not necessarily adds much more to it. That would be negative approach and one could more positively say that since Vidna Obmana is no more, it has found a great successor in Premonition Factory. The six lengthy pieces of music are all dark and introspective, maybe even a bit sombre, and make up some excellent late night music. Excellent works, if indeed nothing new under the moon. The titles could have some rethinking (‘The Future Will Be Whatever We Make It’?) and a picture of the composer on the album? Mwah… That aside, its a most promising start. (FdW)