Artist: Jeff Greinke
Album: Cities In Fog
Release: 1985
Label: Intrepid
Tracklist:
1. Moving Through Fog
2. Urban Pasture
3. Crevice
4. Upwelling
5. Maintain Circulation
6. Scud
7. Foreign Corridor
8. Metal From The Sky
9. Offshore Search
10. Among Icebergs
While it may seem implausible to most, in high school, I had an insatiable thirst for more than just twee pop and bad hardcore. Of the countless hours I spent researching and discovering all sorts of new sounds, I spent a considerable amount of time with dark ambient music. The album that truly got me into the genre was Jeff Greinke's debut album, Cities In Fog.
Cities In Fog is one of the most chilling pieces of music I have ever heard, so much so that I once made the mistake of falling asleep to it, experiencing near-traumatic nightmares, and waking up drenched in my own sweat (and, potentially, my own urine), which places the album in very select company as an album to do this to me (if you're wondering, the other two are Lustmord's The Place Where Black Stars Hang and Lady GaGa's The Fame Monster).
Why does the album have such a profound effect upon me? It might lie somewhere in it being so naturalistic and possessing surprising depth and masterful texture. The album seems to be composed of sampled found sounds and other, subtle and metallic pulsation. If there ever was a soundtrack to a dead factory, it would be this. Many albums have postured and claimed to be soundtracks of an urban landscape or urban mold, but Cities In Fog is one of the few to actually have a right to the claim. When I listen to it, I find myself imagining myself from the third person in the sky, moving extremely slowly through, you guessed it, an empty and dead city consumed by fog. It's quite suffocating, yet strangely beautiful.
Greinke didn't pursue this sound much further than this album, though he did record a whole second part (appropriately titled Cities In Fog 2) of the album to coincide with the CD reissuing of this classic album, recorded almost exactly a decade after the original. Still, Cities In Fog is the favorite Jeff Greinke release of both Johnny B and I, and possibly my favorite dark ambient album, in general.
-Adam
4 comments:
So Adam, how do you think this LP compares to "Dead Cities" by Future Sound Of London?
I think the similarities pretty much end with the names of each album and their apparent "goals." It's FSOL, so Dead Cities still makes me want to shake it.
Also, Cities in Fog has way less embarrassing art than Dead Cities haha
-Adam
This is great, Thank You for sharing. I just picked it up on vinyl last week. Do you suggest anything else in a similar vein?
Thomas Koner!
-Adam
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