This is an album which mixes elegant instrumentals with atmospheric vocal tracks to provide an ambient soundtrack which is by turns deeply soothing and mildly irritating.
Nooten is a former member of Dutch 4AD dark wave band Clan Of Xymox who, aside from his solo work, recorded a well regarded album Sleeps With The Fishes in 1987 with guitarist Michael Brook.
Surround Us was composed, mixed and produced at home on a Mac Book Pro and midi keyboard with no other instruments used except a cello played by Lucas Stam.
Stam features on four tracks which ,not coincidentally, are the best on the album: Ode, An End, Drone, Dutch Clouds.
As on his previous album - Here Is Why - Nooten recruits guest female vocalists on several tracks with mixed results.
The voice as instrument of Kristin Oppenheim on Blue Wonder works very well and This World ,with words and vocals by Susan Bauszat, is a kind of an aural comfort blanket.
Less appealing are Anybody and Soothing Dust, sung by Renee Stahl and Yvette Winkler respectively, which are full of ethereal gibberish about lighting your way on life's journey and following the heart's path.
On Secret Room there is a cautionary, and fairly silly, tale told by 'Lisa' with a plummy English accent where you led to imagine that a woman who unlocks the door to the secret room suffers some dark fate - "it is the conspiracy of the man who invented marble" Lisa informs us unhelpfully.
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Even worse than this is Blue Square in which a spoken male voice could have been, and probably was, lifted from one of those guided relaxation tapes and takes the listener through a mind numbingly banal visualization exercise : "just imagine a blue square......just do that now.....right now.....that's good.....that's it.....a blue square". It's a track which increased , rather than reduced, my stress level.
Nooten is on safer ground when he focuses solely on creating instrumental mood pieces as on the tracks with Stam or on Romanz with its refined piano and string arrangement.
The pleasing textures of these tunes just about makes up for the new age twaddle elsewhere.
Pieter Nooten's website
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