Album Review: Celer- Tempelhof

When you run your own label, you can create your own banner year for releases.

Such is the case with William Long, and his Two Acorns label—fresh off of the masterful How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life, Long has returned with the digital release Tempelhof, inspired by his travels on tour across Europe.

Recorded in 2013 and mixed over the last two years, Tempelhof shows an eerie sense of slow motion grandeur that conjures of the feeling of being displaced in a strange land time and time again.

“You wake up and you're in a different place, or already moving on to the next before you can experience the place,” he says in the liner notes on the album’s Bandcamp page.

Similar to a number of ambient, experimental, and drone releases, Tempelhof is a pure headphone record—sure, you could listen to it over a stereo, but then you’d miss out on the fully encompassing moments of the opening tracks—“Light Inside and Ahead” and “Deck Allusion”; both of which completely envelop the listener as their respective tones and rich layers unfold.

As an album, Tempelhof ebbs and flows—between each longer piece are interludes, like transferring at a train station, and each segment nearly segues into the next. Between “Deck Allusion,” “Night Train t Berlin,” and “A Single Quantum Event,” the same tone and atmosphere is sustained throughout all three before it slowly fades away.

Like all good ambient and experimental music, Tempelhof works to create a feeling—it’s a calming, reassuring record. Even though each piece has a very similar sound, there are enough subtle differences throughout the overall warm feeling that this set give off as a whole that make it a worthwhile, evocative listening experience. 

Tempelhof is out now as a digital release via Two Acorns.