Label: Chill Tribe Records
Released: 2008

01. Noises Of Us
02. Slappna Av
03. Postcards Are People
04. Monica's Hunger
05. Tablatronix
06. Scarborough Unfair
07. Ziggurat
08. We Could Be Housewives
09. Dim Summing
10. Coon Calling
11. Sunshy
12. To My Future Past

"Gringo Locomotion" is the sixth CD in discography of Norwegian Chill Tribe Records. The album is a work of ten years. This is the first ambient descendant of Ian Johansson known f.e. for his involving in a legendary Koxbox project. In the aspect of package we have a simple digipack, in its content quite intriguing art cover which second side contain interesting manifesto of Ian. Unfortunately, I must mention about awful digipack's inside - we have pinkly-black colours without any conception. This is something completely different than nice for the eyes design of this label's compilations. But this aesthetic will go to the not existing background just after the first listen to the CD.

It's because this album is a special one. This CD is like a thought's picture of a lonely person that desire to stop the reality. But then, this depth of solitude leave in a psyche of listener its overwhelming mark. Not disappear so quickly. It's pricking, it's difficult to take away this feeling, it's difficult to overcome it just with a power of will. So this is a very difficult album to hear, to receive these sounds. If you want to listen to it like to the usual music, without the headphones on ears, you can fill aversion. Perhaps the time is needed to understand it. But it is also possible, that even if we have a good willingness - we won't feel a dagger of its sophisticated vision. This is this type of album, that described for sure as good, will be not pleasurable for everyone - even for a person that think that this CD will like for 100%.

This is how it works with "Gringo Locomotion". This album have its mysterious abysses that you will want to find, but not always it will be so simple. For example, from the technical-only perspective, this hour-long album in a big majority is ambient as music, in a small minority is ambient as background (and it's not like these sounds are in type of "forest" always) - and I feel as if that second group rule over that first group. Apart of this, there is also an impression, that a big part of ambient as music is ambient as background. What lead to the situation that definitely we have more sounds secluded, isolated, than a real music. And they exactly, after hearing this album as music, could make an uncomfortable feeling in psyche. (And even causes depression for a moment, what I personally felt). Also we have "song" structures - in quotation marks, because of course experimental style of Ian Ion transform a few of twelve tracks in kind of soul's pray that wish to escape somewhere. Lonely soul.

This is why this album is solely on the headphones. For own world. Is there a chance, that it can create moments of joy there? Yes, but not because of its overtone, because this overtone is arrogant: is expressing loneliness, and this can't be changed. The best point of this album is - in my opinion - the undoubted fact that this CD was created as a journey, as a huge journey: huge and coherent at the same time. In this respect is for sure one of the best albums I've ever heard. Ian skilfully manipulated the sound to the situation that this sound is walking on a path of loneliness and not turn aside from it. Here is a beauty of the album, here is a beauty of the whole ambient: that it can create a journey, a trip to the reality created by an artist. This is a heart of the art.

"Gringo Locomotion" is a very experimental album. This isn't always a liquid ambient builded on pads - the sound transport us, but with stops. And the stops can be described only as abstraction, anti-music (for those who don't swim in ambient), sounds as a reason for something, these are that ambient as background. They slow down the journey and then convert to the structures melodoius-like. As if we changed a vehicle of the journey, but the journey is still going on that loneliness path. In this one hour journey we won't meet many melodies, we won't meet a classic beauty, but still this album will want many from the listener and give in exchange only that coherent vision.

Another time Chill Tribe released album by one artist, which album contain every kind of quality thanks to which the album is artistically successful. Another time also it is an album of one artist that brings peculiar vision thanks to which commercial success will be for sure not achieved. But, after all, that's not what art is about.