<img src="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/store_images/medium/close_MED.jpg" align="left" height="150" width="150" />Hidden Shoal Recordings is proud to announce the digital pre-release of the eagerly awaited sophomore album by American ambient craftsman <a href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/artists/wes-willenbring">Wes Willenbring</a>. <a href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=20&amp;products_id=125"><em>Close, But Not Too Close</em></a> sees Willenbring develop on the gorgeous palette of tones explored on acclaimed debut <a href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=20&amp;products_id=38"><em>Somewhere, </em></a><em><a href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=20&amp;products_id=38"><em>Someone</em></a></em><em> Else</em>. As with Willenbring’s debut, <em>Close, But Not Too Close</em> is all about time in both it’s broadest and most discrete sense. There is a deliberation present in it’s composition that makes for a level of engagement far beyond any easy notion of what ambient music is or should be.

The album opens with the elegiac organ drones of ‘I’m Looking Forward To Your Funeral’, immediately setting the scene for this shadow filled, introspective, eight-song opus. The track showcases Willenbring’s masterful balance of passage and destination. The wonderfully received single ‘Oh, Most’ is submerged in icy washes of guitar, under which piano and bass meet in a rhythmic valium struggle. A plaintive cyclical piano line leads ‘My Ghostly Fingers’ before being joined by vacillating Mellotron flute lines as if Satie had fallen to dream. The classical guitar lines in ‘The Burrow’ literally dig into your subconscious, from where a warm yet unearthly Mellotron acts as a kind of embrocation. ‘For All The Strays’ would have sounded perfectly at home on Willenbring’s debut with it’s dry, pure electric guitar tones, delicately placed piano chords in the foreground and smears of drone threatening in the distance. This bridging of melody and texture, of form and formlessness, time and time again draws the listener into territory that is at once unknown yet intimately familiar – a place that is as marked by notions of transformation as it is by melancholy.

<em>“Absolutely gorgeous. Dreamy dark meandering melancholia for fans of Stars Of The Lid, Eluvium, Dead Texan, Tim Hecker, Godspeed and other purveyors of darkly dramatic, abstract moody minimalism” </em><strong>– Aquarius Records on Somewhere Someone Else</strong>

<em>Close, But Not Too Close</em> is now available in digital format from the <a href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=20&amp;products_id=125">Hidden Shoal Store</a> and all good third-party digital music stores (iTunes, eMusic, Amazon, LaLa, Bandcamp etc). The album will see its official CD release on the 12th of November. Read a full press release <a href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/press/">here</a>.

<a href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/Media/HSR_Radio/Wes_Willenbring/close_but_not_too_close/My_Ghostly_Fingers.mp3">Wes Willenbring - My Ghostly Fingers</a>  <em>Wes Willenbring - My Ghostly Fingers </em>