Reviews

Igloo MagazineÜmlaut is the project of innovative, minimal ambient sound producer and multifaceted artist Jeff Düngfelder. Well known for followers of Audiobulb‘s prolific activity in the defense of adventurous-mindful electronic music. This album is conceived as an imaginary soundtrack for films, inviting the listener to delve into luminous and abstract sound bath, in a deep quietness. The flow of ideas beautifully merges aleatoric sound manipulations, inspired by electroacoustic research, with occasional pulsating electro grooves (intelligent techno/IDM), and azurean-vaporous ambient pads reminiscent of a sound healing experience.

This is the third chapter of a ‘music for films’ series, which began in 2019 and continues on Audiobulb Records. Ümlaut succeeds in achieving a balance between the easy-listening facet of ambient music—characterized by ascending synthetic harmonies and detached melodious lines—and a more conceptual approach rooted in avant-garde, stochastic, and spectral experimentation, built on processed acoustic sounds, accidents, and repetitive motifs.

The cinematic resonance is subtle, evoking inner films born from subconscious activity or drifting retrospective memories—fragments of souvenirs. Fans of analog electronic-futuristic reveries, as well as ambient house with hypnotic tones and a delicate sense of lyricism, won’t be disappointed. There is an implicit musical filiation and stylistic alignment with artists such as Li YiLei, Alex Smalley, Lingua Lustra, Mick Chillage, and Lee Anthony Norris.

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Organ ThingÜmlaut – Musique de Film III (Audiobulb) – Following in the tracks of the tracks on Musique de Film I and Musique de Film II (rather obviously), Ümlaut’s new album, Musique de Film III, continues to rather beautifully explore “the relationship between sound and vision”, although right here we are, besides the images painted in our heads, dealing with the sound rather than the vision. “As a point of departure, this album presents a new creative direction in the evolution Ümlaut’s unique world. Each of the twelve audio and video tracks were created individually and simultaneously, with an overarching theme of perpetual geographies in mind. While the titles impart hints as to a song’s inherent meaning, room is left for listeners to discover their own interpretations”.

“Simplicity is the key” so we’re told and yes, it is simple, it is minimal in a full bodied manner, minimal for “maximum sensual impact”, rather beautiful but then it has arrived here on a gloriously sunny Autumn morning. The instrumental pieces, although he calls them songs, I always thought a song required something you could sing? These pieces of soundscape or sound art or musical composition or something somewhere near the combination of those three of those things are “stripped down their essentials. Nothing is superfluous. The sound is futuristic, yet immediate, where being in the moment yields rewards. A palette of atmospheric colours and spectral harmonics lures the listener into a peaceful dimension of silence and harmony, where delicate field recordings and distorted textures are threaded with warmth”. And yes, I’m being lazy, I’m throwing the artist’s or maybe the label’s own words back out there and time is off the essence and I have may own art to make rather than standing here banging out words on a keyboard and dancing around this architecture. 

These are a beautifully detailed deliciously minimal set of musical pieces,right now this piece, Mandala, is reminding me rather positively of Mike Oldfield’s Woodhenge, most of the time the music Jeff Düngfelder makes reminds me of no one else besides Ümlaut. Expatriates is a particular stand out with that rather bright skip, the whole thing is rather bright actually, rather recommended… 

All music composed and constructed by Jeff Düngfelder using tape loops, field recordings and synthesizers.

“Ümlaut is Jeff Düngfelder, a U.S. experimental composer/sound artist now based in the northern Connecticut countryside.

The thematic concepts distinguishing his work are absence and silence; the ineffable exchange between viewer and image; random moments of stillness within a landscape in flux. Using a minimalistic, electro-acoustic approach, his elusive patchwork of field recordings and electronics merge with the world of shadows and colours. Allowing for infinite possible interpretations, he lets the listener’s imagination fill in the blanks between the grainy textural sounds with elements of ambient, musique concrète and noise.

Combining spaciousness with a sense of intimacy introduces a musical language of experimental ambience. His memory recordings expose the complex relationship between music and silence.

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