In the absence of Stars of the Lid, there’s been no shortage of great drone and ambient artists, but I believe no one is as close to the duo in achieving the supposedly transcendent state of mind as Celer. Taking the descriptive route instead of the abstract, the project has had a high amount of output in the last couple of years, has been varied in its consistency and ideas but not so much in quality, and has remained  good and enjoyable regardless of being ephemeral.  With Celer, there is a clear understanding of what drone is, a subconscious revelation of it being like a psychology of time, a detailed map of a moment.

Pockets of Wheat finds its movement in this terrain, a zone located in the fringes of a photograph (an instant of death, a phantasm of the present), calmly reverberating with electronics along an hour of sound continuum. A glassy sound like that of a Tibetan bowl marks a frame in time and extends it, creating a wave that is eventually washed over by a second sound. Like a lake’s surface caressed by winds converging, the drone travels in a dozen different directions at once and at the same time remains still, unchanged. Flourishing in the middle point between painting and architecture, Celer sculpts this sort of tranquility with restrained passion, an emotional rationality that embraces said phantasm of the present and acknowledges the absolute nothingness seeping in from the inside: quietude is dissonant, for quietude is the end. The only thing left is a photograph, a second in sound whose lifetime has been prolonged by pure willpower. In its undeath, we find peace, we find nature, we find our own undoing at last. This isn’t art. This is life.

There is another magical manipulation at play: the perfect companion found in evocation. Fields of wheat are suggested in the cover, with the sepia tone being almost unnecessary in this short travel through the light at the end of the tunnel, its magical properties becoming practically instantaneous when we close our eyes. The drones take our imagination to this land of photographic stills, letting us explore the continuum at our leisure, evoking atomic images and symmetrical pockets of vegetation. The wind makes an entrance, and the entire field moves along with it. We cannot feel anything, for we are just an ethereal presence, but we slowly imagine how it feels. Nearing the conclusion of the piece, we start to picture our bodies once more, calmly hoping that when it’s over and we open our eyes the field of wheat will be there, with the wind and the movement signaling our demise, our ultimate transcendence into the loving arms of nature.

Technically, there might be better electronic ambient out there, maybe even better drones, but Celer’s work is still probably more meaningful and full of significance. Pockets of Wheat might help one sleep, walk through the park, or relax from a hard day at work, but it will possibly always remain in the periphery of one's mind, enacting its magic on time and on imagination, waiting for the listener to enter the positive realm of clarity, nothingness, and beauty in which it resides.

-David Murrieta