Pitchfork

Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die was so troublingly serene in execution that I was undone the first time I heard it. The music on that disc seemed to alternate capriciously between the sound of conspiracy and the sound of accident. In certain moments, Millions Now Living actually sounded millions of years in the making: the layers had happened upon each other in an accidental intimacy in the manner of continents. So when Tortoise's TNT failed to produce this uncanny preordained sense of absolute rightness, people turned on it somewhat, overlooking its facile loveliness.

Savath & Savalas' hokey-titled Folk Songs for Trains, Trees and Honey is electronic Chicago post-rock in the vein of TNT. It's easy ambient, not quite as terrestrially expansive as, say, Global Communications' 76:14 or astronomically warped as The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. The music is truly beautiful, the groove is faithful and the effects enchant without alienating. The whole project has a massage-chair energy, purring constantly under the backside of the mind. What you get with the vibrating massage chair is consistency; what you sacrifice is the awkward and often vague sexuality of a human massage. There's no jeopardy in Folk Songs: you don't risk losing your mind, but you don't chance falling in love.

Socrates points it out in Plato's Symposium: Love is temporal. What we love passionately today we love all the more passionately because there's always the possibility that the object of our affections will not be there tomorrow. But the pleasant grooving sway of Folk Songs for Trains, Trees and Honey will always be there, right where you left it when your mind and ears wandered off. This is not to disparage the subtlety of Savath & Savalas' craft, because the pleasantry is textured and self-effacing by design. But it fails to terrify. You never get the sense that you must listen to a particular moment because the entire record exists on the verge of being undone. Just the opposite, actually-- this is ambient true to Brian Eno's intentions: sonic wallpaper, perfected in disappearance. Like a stick of incense, Savath & Savalas' music will continue to perfume the environment long after you have ceased to pay attention to the source.

Unfortunately, Folk Songs for Trains, Trees and Honey just barely breaks the 30-minute mark. Great ambient needs time to erase itself, to nuzzle itself in the quiet of an ordinary room, unobtrusive as passing traffic and street-level exchanges, or footfall overhead. But the album is nevertheless a fine if somewhat innocuous debut, and it'll sketch and slip about the sonic periphery with almost feline equipoise. No more bad dreams. It's easy like Sunday morning.