Cylene Suisse redux by François J. Bonnet & Stephen F. O’Malley

Available on Spotify

Genre: Dark Ambient

Rating: 3/5

Although there’s probably no way to really know it, at least from the sounds, this is a live album taken from the tour following the release of the original Cylene. François J. Bonnet is Kassel Jeager ( https://kasseljaeger.bandcamp.com ) and the author of The Order of Sounds A Sonorous Archipelago (MIT Press) and other books that are now on my too read list and you can give me a break for that because I read a lot. Stephen F. O’Malley is Stephen F. O’Malley but maybe he’s only more famous in my mind. I don’t know. They both seem to be living cool as shit fucking lives. But really these compositions are restructures of the original live recordings by Jim O’Rourke, who floats around great musicians like pot smoke at Woodstock, and Ryoji Ikeda, a composer and visual artist, who might have the coolest resume of any of the four.

This is quality dark ambient on par with Cyro Chamber releases but I doubt any of these guys are going to be hanging their careers on this. I think it’s a little bit too conservative. Or perhaps austere a fairer word.