Description:	Reissued digipak CD on Home Normal, NEW LOW PRICE!!
	Format:	CD
	Genre(s):	Ambient
	Label:	Home Normal
	Price:	£4.99
	Availability:	Sold out / currently unavailable. Sorry!

5
...according to our Brett on 20 March 2009.

The Celer CD wasn't meant to be out until next week but the planets have aligned in a bit of a naughty fashion so here it is bright and early for your delectation. After releases on imprints such as Infraction and Unlabel, Engaged Touches sees the (I think) Parisian pair presenting Engaged Touches via Home Normal in a nice, shiny digipak. I just gave it a sniff to see if it's got that crazy scent these things sometimes do but alas no, I'll have to keep searching for a repeat of that intoxicating hit I first felt from the booklet of Suede's Coming Up CD elsewhere. To be honest it might have sent me over the edge since the music's beautying me out enough to begin with; the way the synthetic strings swell and recede in these extended ambient workouts must be what love feels like - stomachs turning in a warm, fuzzy glow, momentarily forgetting to breathe.. I know now why you cry but it's something I can never do. This is a totally gorgeous album!

Love this record? Hate it? Tell us.

Sound clips for Engaged Touches by Celer: on CD at Norman Records UK. CD, Home Normal, home_n002r, £4.99.

What their label says...

The music of Will Thomas Long's and Danielle Baquet-Long's Celer is an absorbing
combination of classic ambient, minimalism, and – perhaps as thee most distinct
characteristic – overwhelming romanticism. Longinng, melancholy, nostalgia, and the
like seem to be recurring themes in Will and Dani's works.
Engaged Touches begins with hypnotic sounds of a train clattering on its tracks.
This departure seems to set the whole piece into a context of travel and distance,
moving away from and towards something, someone. After a while these sounds give
way to a rousing, majestic set of string loops. Similar phases of different field
recordings and grandiose loops take turns throughout the whole work. This brings about
a dynamics of contrasts: the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the general, the
mundane and the exalted, and so on. The phases of string loops take up most of the
album and evoke a yearning feeling of distance, grand and epic. The title, Engaged
Touches, however, refers to quite the opposite, the close and intimate. It feels as if it is
these kinds of touches that the string loops wailingly, albeit very gracefully, long for.
This is exactly the kind of powerful romanticism that seems to define so much
of Celer's work.
Because of the heavy presence of string loops Engaged Touches reminds me of
some of Celer's earlier works. I would call it a classic Celer piece, if it weren't for the
fact that their oeuvre spans only a few years back, and it would be too early to ponder
the distinct phases and the internal relations in their output.
Engaged Touches is another beautiful addition to the rapidly growing body of work by Celer – an oeuvre that I already consider one of thhe most important in modern ambient music.
- Antti Rannisto