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Celer, “It Would Be Giving Up” (Two Acorns, 2014)

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This latest boxed set to emerge from Will Long’s Celer reissue campaign celebrates one of the project’s more recent works, as It Would Be Giving Up was originally released as a digital-only album back in late 2020. As was the case with previous reissues, the album has been remastered by Stephan Mathieu, but the more exciting bit is that I had never actually heard this particular album before and it instantly became my favorite Celer release by a wide margin. That makes sense, as according to Long, It Would Be Giving Up is thematically tied to two of Celer’s other recent classics (Future Predictions and Memory Repetitions), as the three albums focus upon “ensemble pieces made with tape loops and analog instruments” and share a certain “wall of sound” aesthetic. While my love of Future Predictions is well-documented and remains as strong as ever, I now believe that It Would Be Giving Up is the single most essential album in Celer’s entire discography, as it beautifully transcends the ambient/drone milieu to strain towards ecstatic heartache as high art.

The album consists of four longform pieces that are each relegated to their own separate disc. That initially seemed like a curious decision, as the first two pieces could have easily fit on the same disc, but I ultimately decided that it made perfect sense to treat each piece like a standalone album or EP. In essence, It Would Be Giving Up is essentially four top-tier Celer releases with enough stylistic and thematic common ground to be presented together, which is important to note, as there is not a single weak piece to be found. This album is a four-disc tour de force because that is simply how much great material Long had recorded: nothing is unnecessarily extended and there is no filler to be found anywhere. This is simply four absolutely stellar pieces in a row without a detour or lull in sight.

The first piece, the 20-minute “True Maps Of An Unreal Place,” is the album’s most bold and unexpected stretch, as it is probably as close to a visceral harsh noise performance as Celer will ever get. Characteristically, there is also an endlessly looping melodic theme as well (albeit one with sharper edges than usual) and that motif beautifully floats above the roiling and howling maelstrom like shimmering and flickering psychedelic clouds over a violent and tumultuous sea. The following 17-minute “To Stay Up Above” is an unusual piece as well, as a half-majestic/half-menacing melody insistently loops over a murky, rumbling backdrop to evoke an epic and foreboding scene akin to the opening of Aguirre: The Wrath of God: a line of doomed conquistadors slowly navigating a fog-shrouded mountain pass, hopelessly dwarfed by their immense and dramatic surroundings. Sadly, Popul Vuh already recorded the perfect score to that film years before Will Long was even born, but “To Stay Up Above” is a wonderfully sinister mirage of a piece nonetheless: the looping melody remains constant in some ways, but also feels wonderfully liquid, unstable, and out of sync with itself as well. It is easily one of Long’s most impressive feats of loop sorcery to date.

Remarkably, however, those first two pieces are merely an appetizer for the more substantial pieces to come, as “Imagined Settlement” and “An Evening, Elsewhere” both clock in at around 45 minutes of mesmerizing, haunting magic. In fact, “Imagined Settlement” may very well be the greatest Celer piece of all time, as its melancholy string motif has the intoxicating feel of a darkly sensuous dream. It also features an absolutely sublime dynamic arc, as the looping melody feels like it is subtly dissolving, distorting, and unraveling as it unfolds. In classic Celer fashion, the transformation is too slow and subtle to even notice in real time, but at some point one note starts to be feel especially intense and the melody starts to feel like a seductive Ouroboros in addition to being a blearily obsessive juggernaut and a dreamlike fantasia of quavering and ghostly overtones.

Remarkably, the closing “An Evening, Elsewhere” is similarly immersive and haunting, albeit in a very different way. It initially feels like lush and heavenly slow-moving clouds of frayed, soft-focus strings or slow, celestial exhalations. As the relationship between the various elements gradually transforms, however, subtle shifts in emotion start to become apparent and evoke everything from heartache floating in a sea of bliss to a melancholy, narcotic cocoon to a distant lighthouse in a fog of soft-focus anguish to a soul ascending towards a divine light. Of course, I am sure that I am merely projecting all of that onto the piece, but it is nevertheless a uniquely entrancing work that feels pregnant with heavy emotion and ineffable profundity. I wouldn’t be projecting a damn thing at all if I did not find “An Evening, Elsewhere” to be so gorgeously immersive and soulful.

As I have noted many times before, the Celer pieces that have made the deepest impact on me have always been the ones in which a single perfect loop is allowed to lazily unfold into infinity (or at least for the duration of an album). All four of the pieces collected on It Would Be Giving Up are variations on that same winning and time-tested vision, but this album reveals an additional layer to Long’s artistry that I had not appreciated until now. I had previously believed that Long was singularly gifted at distilling an emotion into its purest essence by crafting absolutely gorgeous loops. Obviously, there is a lot of artistry in finding the perfect texture, melody, and rhythm needed to cast a hypnotic and absorbing spell, but I can now see that subtly manipulating the volume of individual components with seemingly supernatural patience is yet another level of artistry altogether and can make an already achingly beautiful loop reveal even deeper and more nuanced shades of emotion. I usually try to avoid throwing around the word “cinematic” when i describe an album, as it usually implies that something would be a fine score for a visual accompaniment, but this album is cinematic in a way that makes me feel like reality has dissolved and I am now living inside an especially poetic moment from a heartbreaking masterpiece of longing like In The Mood For Love and that is quite a desirable place to linger. I genuinely cannot praise this album enough, as literally every aspect of this release captures Long at the absolute height of his powers. Getting lost in this album is a truly beautiful way to spend an afternoon.

Listen here.

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Celer, “Engaged Touches (Expanded and Remastered)” (Two Acorns, 2024)

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Will Long’s ambitious campaign to remaster and reissue key highlights from Celer’s overwhelmingly vast discography continues with this expanded reincarnation of 2009’s Engaged Touches (appropriately released on fellow ex-pat/ambient artist Ian Hawgood’s Home Normal label during its Japan-based era). The album is an especially noteworthy release within the Celer canon for a couple of reasons, but the big one is that it ranks alongside 2008’s Discourses of the Withered and 2019’s Xièxie as one of the project’s perennial fan favorites. While my own pantheon of essential Celer albums does not always align with that of said fanbase, this one’s prominent place makes sense, as it was definitely one of the most high-profile albums released during the white-hot height of Celer-mania. As such, it was probably one of the first Celer albums that many people heard. It is also inarguably one of the strongest albums recorded during the project’s early days as a husband-and-wife duo with Danielle Baquet-Long (Chubby Wolf) and most of the other contenders were not yet widely available before Bandcamp transformed the musical landscape. Given that, a reissue was both welcome and inevitable, but those who already love this album will likely be thrilled by the prospect of hearing it in its newly expanded and remastered form.

Much like how Wong Kar Wai was unable to resist tweaking the color grading of his films when the opportunity to release 4K restorations of his oeuvre presented itself, this version of Engaged Touches has been transformed and reshaped a bit by Long. Obviously, just about any artist can find room for improvement with the benefit of hindsight, but assessing whether this expansion is a significant improvement over the original is a bit tricky given the nature of the music (endlessly repeating slow-motion loops). In any case, this new version is roughly three times as long as the original (now either 3 CDs or 5 vinyl sides), but it is also two versions of the same album: the first two discs offer a new version with extended track lengths, while the third disc remains faithful to the original in every way except being remastered by Stephan Mathieu.

Naturally, it sounds great, but so did the previously available digital version, so I don’t know how long ago that remastering took place. Notably, there are also a couple of new pieces included (“In Bright The Days” and “If Disabuse Is So Hard, Then”), but their combined length is a mere four minutes. Consequently, the album’s transformation is essentially a durational one, albeit with some subtle enhancements to the flow (placement of field recordings, insertion of the two brief pieces between “Unless They Were Beautiful” and “What Our Mouths Make Them,” etc.).

That said, a significant part of Celer’s appeal has always been durational in nature, so the effect of the expansion is definitely felt and significantly transforms the listening experience. Listening deeply to one of Celer’s major works is like being completely immersed in someone else’s dream, so the tone of the album is arguably more important than any other aspect, though there are certainly exceptions to that statement. In general, however, how much I enjoy a Celer album comes down to which particular strain of billowing, looping, soft-focus melancholy resonates with me the most. In fact, an album like this one almost shares more common ground with a perfume than it does with music, as its pleasures are akin to an intoxicating spell.

In keeping with that theme, characterizing the spell of Engaged Touches feels a lot like trying to describe wine or a fragrance with terms like “earth,” “smoke,” and “leather”: it is more of an evocative art than an exacting science. For me, this album feels like “faded grandeur” mingled with “watching rain-soaked landscapes roll by from the window of a clattering train while I drift off to sleep.” That impression is subjective as hell, of course, but the “train” bit is not entirely a projection, as recurring interludes of train and train station sounds are a consistent thread running throughout the entire album.

To my ears, “Openings Of Love (Fireworks)” is the album’s sublime zenith, as beautiful slow-moving swells languorously roll across a quivering bed of drones for nearly 20 minutes while leaving a subtly accumulating haze of overtones, feedback, and shifting harmonies in their wake. The expanded version is slightly longer than the original version, but it is the sort of piece that could have easily been expanded to an entire album, as it is an absolute masterpiece of patience, control, and glacial transformation. Another variation of that feat is “Hanging Herself On The Lonely Fifth Column,” as a lushly romantic two-chord loop steadily accumulates an intensifying trail of gently oscillating decay. Elsewhere, “Unless They Were Beautiful” endlessly loops a string motif that evokes the delirious cinematic romanticism of a poignant moment suspended forever in time. One of the album’s shortest pieces is an unexpected highlight as well, as “Separations And Reactions” unfolds as a two-minute fantasia of shimmering, watery dream-chords over an elusive and enigmatic rumble of field recordings.

Given that Engaged Touches features at least four top-tier pieces from Celer’s duo era, it is basically required listening for any self-respecting fan of the project, but whether that necessitates diving into the expanded version is entirely dependent on the degree of said fandom. For me, the single-album version of Engaged Touches is immersive enough without any further expansion, but the inclusion of Danielle’s photography and her related poem make the physical release feel personal and almost sacred in a way that a digital album cannot hope to match. This is a beautiful object in its own small, quiet, and minimal way, which nicely mirrors how I feel about the music.

Listen here.

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Celer, “Selected Self-releases 2006-2007” (Two Acorns, 2023)

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Given Celer’s incredibly voluminous discography, releasing any kind of comprehensive retrospective would be one hell of a quixotic and cost-prohibitive endeavor, but this collection does the next best thing. Weighing in at 14 discs spanning 10 albums, this boxed set celebrates an especially significant and prolific era in the project’s evolution: the self-released albums that Will Long and the late Danielle Baquet-Long (Chubby Wolf) recorded as a duo before the latter’s passing in 2009. Not all of them, mind you, but this collection seems to at least cover the ones that matter most.

Given that Celer is based in Japan and Bandcamp was still in its formative stages back then, I suspect very few people were hip enough to pounce on the duo’s early CD-Rs at the time of their original release, but the world definitely began to take notice soon after, as I remember Celer albums being a very hot commodity sometime around 2008/2009 when they started getting widely re-released. Unsurprisingly, there are some remastered fan favorites from that era included here, such as Continents and Cantus Libres, but I have grown so accustomed to Long’s current elegantly minimalist dream-drone aesthetic that I was legitimately surprised by the wider palette of moods and atmospheres explored at the project’s inception. Naturally, the gorgeously warm ambient dreamscapes that Celer has long been synonymous with are still the main draw here, but they are not the only draw, as I found it very illuminating to revisit the less-remembered noirish and sci-fi-inspired sides of the duo’s exploratory beginnings.

This collection is only being released as a limited edition physical boxed set, which makes a lot of sense for a couple of big reasons. The mundane one is that all of these albums are already readily available in remastered form, so this retrospective is very much for the project’s more devoted fans. The more poetic and heartfelt reason is that this boxed set is essentially a memorial to the Dani era and music was merely one facet of the duo’s artistic vision. Obviously, the music is the biggest and most relevant reason for Celer’s continued appeal, but the project has always been something of a multimedia love story/travel diary as well, as the accompanying images and texts often provided important context, clues, and deeper shades of meaning. In fact, I sincerely doubt that Celer would have made such a deep impression if Will and Dani had not found a way to make ambient/drone music feel like something personal and intimate (a feat very few others have achieved). Consequently, making this a collection a physical object with all of Dani’s poems and photos intact seems like the only proper way to celebrate the duo’s shared story.

That said, nearly all of the texts, images, and song titles do tend to be teasingly enigmatic. In fact, they almost act like an inversion of the film/film score relationship, as they color my perception of the music without providing much actual information beyond a sense of place and an impressionist glimpse of how Will and Dani were feeling about both life and each other at the time. While I would probably love a Will Long memoir or travel diary, the decision to portray that period instead as an elusive, elliptical, and mysterious collection of dreamlike sounds, images, and words is admittedly the more alluring and Celer-esque path to take. Words and unambiguous meanings are cool and all, but struggling to express the ineffable is a beautiful and noble way to spend an artistic career.

As often happens with William Basinski’s similarly minimal work, it is easy to (wrongly) dismiss a lot of Celer’s work as a few simple loops endlessly repeating, but it seems more like a near-religious obsession with reaching towards the sublime to me. In fact, my favorite Celer pieces tend to be exactly those in which a single blurred and frayed melodic fragment is simply allowed to endlessly loop into infinity (or at least for 20 minutes or so). Obviously, progression and evolution have their place, yet distilling something beautiful to its absolute essence and straining towards the transcendent offers a more rare and exquisite pleasure than what I generally expect to get out of albums.

When I hear a truly great Celer piece, I am reminded of the film at the heart of Infinite Jest that is so lethally compelling that no one can stop watching once it starts. In Celer’s case, there is instead a gift for crafting loops so gorgeous that I am perfectly content to let them hypnotically unfold forever without any transformation. When everything about a piece is already perfect, there is no valid reason to break that spell other than the inherent durational limits of physical media.

Needless to say, there are plenty of Celer pieces both new and old that achieve that illusion of an infinite, endlessly billowing heaven and those are usually the pieces that I am thinking of when I describe something as “Celer-esque.” However, spending an entire weekend absorbing this 14-disc retrospective has reminded me that there has been considerably more variety and experimentation with this project than I remembered. For example, this boxed set covers at most only two years of recordings and just from a compositional standpoint alone, there are albums comprised entirely of short pieces, albums comprised entirely of longform pieces, a single album-length track (Para’s “Leave Us Alone To Be Together”), and a collection of 22 brief loops intended to be played in a newly shuffled sequence every time (Voodoo Crowds).

There is quite a lot of stylistic variety as well, albeit exclusively within the realm of ambient drone. The pieces from Sunlir (first released in May 2006) in particular are especially varied and unique. For example, the opening “Spelunking The Arteries Of Our Ancestors” feels mostly like the Celer I know and love, yet also features an oscillating and sci-fi-damaged industrial thrum in its depths that provides an unfamiliar edge of psychotropic unease. Soon after, “How Long To Hold Up A Breathless Face” approximates a fragment of an orchestral film noir score that has been frozen in quivering suspended animation. Not long after, “Espy The Horizon, Miss The Long Road” seems to reprise that trick with a brooding and epic-sounding fantasy score.

Elsewhere, “Whimsical At The Cretaceous Extinction” is probably the biggest Sunlir-era revelation, as it feels like a steadily intensifying cosmic shudder of futuristic menace. There are some dark surprises lurking on the other disks as well, however (albeit less frequently). For example, “Archival Footage of Only The Lost And Forgotten” from Scols resembles a time-stretched nightmare orchestra, while Continents’ hallucinatory “Fast Forwarding Sleep” evoked the “haunted ballroom” magic of The Caretaker years before most people had even noticed that The Caretaker existed. The phantasmal horror of “Brackish Nagas Too Low In The River” was yet another bombshell for me, evoking a supernatural howl of anguish that would have made a fine (if harrowing) score for 2001 or Solaris.

While I tend to gravitate towards the one-offs, outliers, and “roads less traveled” on this collection due to my reasonably strong familiarity with Celer’s usual oeuvre, I suspect complete familiarity with Celer’s discography is an unattainable state. In fact, I would be surprised if even Will Long remembered everything collected here. For example, I probably have somewhere around two dozen arguably well-chosen Celer albums in my collection (weighted heavily towards this era, no less), yet there were still plenty of classic pieces that I had not encountered before Selected Self-releases entered my life.

There were also plenty of seemingly familiar pieces that made a deeper impression on me now that I have revisited them more than a decade after their original release. I have no idea how much of that shift is due to my evolving taste, the magic of remastering, or because I simply did not listen closely enough the first time around, but it feels like I just unearthed a fresh treasure trove of hits regardless. In particular, I was enraptured by the smeared, hissing, and buzzing magic of Scols’ “Municipally, I Let It Slip,” much of Cantus Libres, some of Continents and Neon, “Sans Heavens, Hand In Hand,” and a handful of quivering feedback-gnawed pieces like Sadha’s “The Once Emptiness Of Our Hearts,” but that is by no means a comprehensive list.

My conservative estimate is that there are at least three or four hours of prime/classic Celer highlights to be found here, which is extremely damn impressive for a retrospective encompassing just two years of a project that has nearly spanned two decades. Obviously, Will Long conjured this boxed set into existence primarily for Dani and Celer’s most ardent fans (only a hundred copies were made), yet this is the sort of retrospective that deserves to ripple outwards to turn new and casual fans onto some underheard gems from the early days. Obviously, there have been a healthy amount of stellar Celer releases in more recent years as well, but Selected Self-releases is a necessary reminder that Will and Dani were onto something wonderful and distinctive right from the start.

The individual albums can be heard here.

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Celer, “Future Predictions” (Two Acorns, 2020)

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Explaining why one Celer album is significantly better than another is no simple task, as Will Long is generally an extremely consistent artist who has released a huge volume of warmly lovely, loop-based ambient drone albums. Consequently, it is dangerously easy to take his artistry for granted, as a casual listener would not be crazy for finding a lot of Celer’s oeuvre relatively interchangeable. From my perspective, however, Celer can be viewed as Long’s tireless and Romantic quest to conjure up fragments of melody so achingly sublime that they can be looped into infinity. In that regard, Long has rarely come closer to realizing that dream than he does on Future Predictions. These four lengthy compositions capture Long at the absolute peak of his powers, resulting in the rarest of achievements: a 2+ hour album that leaves me wanting more and regularly inspires me to start it all over again as soon as it ends.

One aspect of Will Long’s artistry that I have always appreciated is his ability to evoke the sense that there is a deep undercurrent of emotion, mystery, and meaning lurking within his work, which is a trick that very few other ambient artists are able to pull off. It certainly does not hurt that Long is also a fitfully brilliant minimalist composer, but there is definitely something larger and more compelling than that happening with this project: Long has amassed a vast body of work that feels like a bittersweetly beautiful, impressionistic, and ever-expanding palace of memories. 

As befits a release as ambitious as a 4-CD boxed set, Future Predictions is an especially poignant and enigmatic example of that unusually intimate and diaristic approach to art, as Long accompanies the music with a small booklet of poetic writings, travel photos, and some enticingly cryptic other images of elusive meaning (a black and white photo of a forest fire at night, a picture from an early 20th century Antarctic expedition, a grainy image of the Dead Sea). 

The song titles deepen the mystery still further, as they make reference to cities in Sumatra and Lebanon. Presumably, all have some ties to Long’s own travels and personal memories, but that is not made explicit nor should it be considered a given: Long is certainly welcome to craft any poetic fictions he wants while straining to express the ineffable. In fact, all of the accompanying texts and images might be a fiction, as Long describes Future Predictions as “a meditation on future events” and a sort of inversion of 2018’s backwards-looking Memory Repetitions retrospective. Still, I would be very surprised if Future Predictions was not largely inspired by real past loves and snatches of beautiful memories. This is a Celer album after all.

Notably, there are allegedly some field recordings buried throughout the album, but they are far too well concealed to provide any further illumination (though I would be very impressed if they were field recordings from the future). In fact, just about all of the source sounds have been blurred and processed into floating, billowing unrecognizability on Future Predictions, as Long’s layers of loops mostly resemble an orchestral recording that has been dissolved and stretched into abstraction. For what it’s worth, my favorite pieces are the two bookends, though the gulf between them and the other pieces is not a large one. Moreover, all four pieces are unified by their similar structure and tone. Long made a conscious decision to avoid any overt “long-term structural development” within these pieces, so all of them begin and end with the same rich tapestry of collaged motifs in place.

The result of that approach is that each piece feels like a sustained dream state that lazily churns with deep drones and swooning, sensuously intertwining, soft-focus melodies. Like a lot of Celer albums, these pieces evoke a mass of thick, slow-moving clouds broken by vibrant streaks of light, but the majestic ascending melodies of a piece like “Merita” suggest the beginnings of a brilliant sunrise as well. In fact, only the more simmering and brooding “No Sleep in Medan” lingers in melancholy, as the remaining three pieces transcend wistful meditation to take a brighter, more hopeful tone. In the wrong hands, such a tone would likely lead in a saccharine direction, but Long has the lightness of touch and intuitive grasp of dynamics and contrast needed to make it work. The closing “Qaraoun” is an especially lovely example of that mastery, as its gorgeous ascending melody has a hallucinatory, shimmering texture that feels like it is echoing around a vast cathedral leaving a trail of quivering, ghostly afterimages in its wake.

The only arguable caveat with Future Predictions is that it is essentially just four elegantly crafted and layered loops allowed to unfold in floating stasis for roughly half an hour each. That will likely drive some people mad, as there truly is no noticeable development within each piece. I have a hard time relating to such a grievance though, as I would be just as happy if this album were just one of those four repeating motifs extended for two hours. Long’s brilliance as a composer lies in the juxtapositions and in the details, so I see no reason for any further transformation to occur when the initial theme is already gorgeous, immersive, and hypnotically meditative . I only find myself wishing something new would happen when I do not find the central motif fully absorbing on its own, which is why I was so fond of the prominent field recordings on Xièxie they made good songs more rich, more textured, and more interesting.

A piece like “Qaraoun,” on the other hand, is simple, perfect, and fully realized right from the start so no further embellishment is needed or desired. In fact, that statement applies to just about everything here. I cannot pretend to have a comprehensive recall of Celer’s entire catalog, but I cannot think of any other albums that are this consistently strong from start to finish. As I have said about William Basinski in the past, it might seem deceptively easy or lazy to compose a piece from just a few endlessly repeating notes, but achieving the balance of rhythm, small-scale dynamics, and shifting harmonies necessary to cast a sustained and beautiful spell requires an enormous amount of skill and patience. As with Basinski’s best work, Future Predictions makes that process seem effortless and organic, but that is precisely because Long is a master illusionist able to produce a distillation so lovely that no traces of the intricate, meticulously shaped scaffolding remain.

Samples can be found here.