I was once asked, “Don't you get bored listening to the same thing over and over?” in reference to my listening to the wonderful collaboration between Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm. At the time I lacked a snappy, eloquent argument for my enjoyment of such a sparse album. My eventual response was something along the lines of “The empty space is as beautiful as the space taken up by sounds. The simplicity allows the listener to think about each note or sound individually,” or something along those lines. Perusing Slow Dancing Society's MySpace page offered a wonderful little quote by Brian Eno regarding ambient music that perhaps illustrates what I was trying to say, but with the eloquence I lacked: “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

Slow Dancing Society has a complexity of sound that allows it to stand out from traditionally ambient music while maintaining the aforementioned ability to be ignored and studied all at once. On one level, the music drones on in a repetitive manner and can easily be lost as noise. As the brain absorbs the music and begins to place it into background processes, new light comes to the music and this ambience becomes a little less ambient in the traditional sense. It would be quite difficult to convince someone that Priest Lake Circa '88 is not an ambient album, but it has a progression that is often lost; this music has taken a turn away from the conventional ambient genre. It is easy to get dissolve in this album, to let yourself fall into meditation as the music plays, but you can't help but notice that the tracks keep disrupting your meditation by moving along to different themes and ideas (this is a good thing, despite how bad 'disrupting your meditation' sounds). Excitement from motion is a welcome change to an increasingly stagnant musical movement.

Textures and timbre are executed with great precision on Priest Lake Circa '88. Even the simplest of songs (read: “The Read Summer Sun”) allow complimentary textures to be layered upon each other to create a robust yet spacious sound. The thickest of compositions carry multi-timbral ideas over a wide range of melodies. Guitar is layered upon found sound, effect-laden synths, organs, and other texturally rich instruments. This makes for an album that is an aural delight for the listener.

At times, certain tracks seem to last a little too long - however, this may be an artifact of mood. At one moment I would want one song to move on, other times I would be shocked when the song ends. Perhaps this hearkens back to the Eno quote above. Priest Lake Circa '88, while labeled ambient, has its own identity that lets it stand out as a unique album in a sea of homogeneity. Ambient listeners will like this album, while ambient haters would do well to give this album a listen and ignore it until they realize that it is interesting.