Rain is a pretty music claims the French netlabel Rain Music (quel harsard) and tries to prove this assertion with three arguments from three different artists:

Menta by vector size starts quietly with clicks and crackles before chopped glitch samples in the tradition of Oval gather momentum. Ambiguous tone shifting with 9th, 11th and 13th chords and a nervously raving subsonic bassline are at pains of restoring the original look and feel of the post 94 Diskont phase, but one cannot ignore the limitations that come along with imitating misunderstood aesthetics, like predictability, contradictions and inconsistencies in the resulting music. Consequently the track wobbles along for another eight minutes before it escalates to a rather embarrassing final with a broad “orchestration”.

Gabriel Hernandez mourns over the rain of a sad summer – as the title pluie d’été triste goes in English – and manages to fill over nine minutes with the nerve-racking tension of falling raindrops. At times the monotony is interrupted by chirping insects, changes of sound characteristics as result of the rain’s intensity changes or water dripping from the roof top very close to the microphone. Certainly exciting minutes for ongoing meteorologists and entomologists, but from a musical perspective I miss the kind of structures that would turn this recording into the result of an intellectual abstraction process.

Finally Jez Riley investigates the question about a possible relationship between Zither & Rain and his findings seem quite promising at first glance: stripped down mystic chords embedded into bleeps and resonant sinus tones create a grave mood, a dead calm before something terrible is happening. But fear not, nothing of that kind will take place here. Instead, some percussive rattling is added and gradually silences the initial theme. And that was it: an ending before the track really got started and another missed opportunity to give this collection a more favourable ending.

To me rain is a pretty music does not live up my expectations from a label that tries to cover electro acoustic sound experimentation and has already released music from the likes of David Velez and Darren McClure. I cannot really say that someone is missing much by ignoring this release and saving one’s bandwidth and time for something more rewarding and exciting.