Ambient music is a misunderstood style of communicable music. There’s light ambiance, which recreates rain or surf, and there is dark ambiance that creates worlds and populates them with strange beings or machinery. What they all have in common is that they place you in a place that feeds off your imagination. The more intricate the music, the farther you go.

Ambient music stretches across every soundscape, and like music, is all things to all people. It can be a balm to a disquieted spirit or a fright to the susceptible soul, but ambience is a style unmatched in its complexities and in its simplicities. And while this may come off as an oxymoron in the highest degree, it explains quite well the effects that are generated by ambiance. Utilizing a minimalist approach to the structure of the music - therefore it’s simplicity - it can make known a wealth of expression, and hence, it’s complexity.

There are excellent talents in this genre of music, many of who periodically release albums of some of the most interesting settings while others create unsettling nightmarish soundtracks. Alio Die, a name of significance amongst aficionados of ambient music, and his collaborator, Mathias Grassow have assembled a 2CD set of what can only be labeled musically textured, disturbed peace. Why? Because it transports you to a place that joins tranquility with forbidding access, to create a sweeping atmosphere of nightmare proportions.

Expanding Horizon is much like standing in the outer periphery of a location that contains no hope other than the allure of solitude. It offers flowing waters and twi-lit skies. But the chirping crickets that run thorough this set reveal an overshadowing darkness. It’s that darkness that is striated throughout this set via a stream of a steady mechanical hum. It is that hum that disturbs because it jostles the tranquility. As you listen, the hum becomes white noise that virtually disappears as you move your way around this world.

What Alio Die and Mathias Grassow have achieved with this release is to construct a place of constant repositioning of reality, much as a drug trip would effect. You’re supposed to flow in and out of ethers of accumulated abstraction. You’re supposed to become engulfed by the overwhelming feeling of weightlessness in a world free of daily grind. In that freedom is a detachment that becomes a departure of normality and thus engenders fear, however minute or vast, depending on your own ability to ‘let go’.

What didn’t work for this 2CD set are the moments of silence as it moves between tracks. Like a splash of cold water, or the yanking of life from a comatose body, the stops remove us, however momentarily, from a wash of intended disorientation. What happens is a very noticeable shift, sometimes from a tranquil moment into a harried blend of dread and displacement. The movement should have been subtle, like a gradual build of a river to whitewater rapids and from the rapids to a gentle flow.

Overall, the set achieves a feeling of removal from your present location. This set was designed to be listened to while in an environment conducive to its effects. Expanding Horizon succeeds in populating its world with enough audio enhancements to move you around its borders. This set is for hardcore ambient fans, as it will require your full attention in order to derive enjoyment from its hefty 2CD spread.

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