niemandsland by Matthew Florianz

Watch a making-of video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDbQb5AKXEQ

Original released on H/S Recordings in 2006.
Produced, Recorded and Composed by Matthew Florianz

Recorded April 2004 / February 2005 at:
Erasmusweg, Den Haag
Louisenburg, Nettetal
Mijendel, Wassenaar
Poelevennsee, Nettetal
Vlaardingsedijk, Maassluis

Steelguitar on Herst and Spiegel sampled from Oscar Stegehuis

Mastering 2005 (available as bonus tracks after purchase)
Re-Release Remaster 2024


REVIEWS

Jim Brenholts
This is not dark ambience! It is totally ambivalent. It seeks neither to soothe nor to provoke. Rather, it seeks to isolate and abandon. (Isolation can be frightening and/or soothing - sometimes simultaneously. It can also be ambivalent.)

This mind numbing set can best be described as the soundtrack for Purgatory. As the focus of a deep listening session, this CD can have a white noise effect. It facilitates relaxation that is neither pleasant nor disturbing. It is psychoacoustic but not quite psychoactive.

This is almost the ultimate ambient music CD. It is perfectly ignorable and strangely interesting. It is also essential.



Stephen Fruitman - sonumu
For a veteran partisan of the genre like myself, Matthew Florianz is an artist who seems to have flown in under the ambient radar. I´m pretty sure I hadn´t even heard his name mentioned before this CD emerged out of the no man´s land of the internet.

A master, it turns out. The ambient of Matthew Florianz is very much like his cover art - doggedly minimalistic, monochrome, existing in a state of near stasis, almost sacral. Far from intimate, it is rather desolate, seeming to take in huge stretches of featureless geography at close range. At other times, the music defies gravity, as if observing weather systems sweeping across the face of the earth from above.



Alan Lockett - e/i

The materiality of Florianz's work on Niemandsland is one of meshed layers, some dissonant but staying on the side of the grainy and glurpy, others more conventionally musical, but with consonant harmonic material distinctly more reticent than on best-known work, Grijsgebied. The extensive field recordings here, such as deployed on the cavernous void-outfolding of Verdwaald and Niemandsland itself, signal a departure from the mainly synthetic drone-based work of recent years. The latter, an 18-minute brooder, too epic to be merely ambient, subtly mutates and evolves into a massive cloud of tuned air mixed with chord-rush to occupy a space not far removed from Roach's Magnificent Void. Having quietened to a virtual lull, it regroups its forces, sonorously rising in a fabulous upsurge to close in what feels like a lightening of the skies after a laregly tenebrous voyage. It shows how versatile an orchestrator of flow and drift Florianz is, capable of hymning the heavens, should he choose, but on Niemandsland it's predominantly a willful, almost portentous, bleakness and an earthly disquiet that seems the obscure object of his muse's desire.



Andy Benford - e-dition print magazine
Matthew Florianz creates a shifting and shimmering wall of sound with drones that sound delicate and complex. If you could hold one you might find many fragile layers closely woven together, creating something different from it's parts. Some are discordant or metallic and others more harmonious, evoking a different imagery. Field recordings do appear in these tracks, wind, birdcalls and insects in flight amongst others, but I felt they supported and complemented the soundscapes they appeared in.

I am a Dutch / Austrian ambient environment soundscapes creator active since 1996.

My music draws immersive soundscapes that blur the line between nature and abstraction.

Electronic textures blending with field recordings to evoke cinematic environments, and dreamlike atmospheres.

Close your eyes and explore auditory worlds both real and imagined.

matthewflorianz.com
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