26072011

Two People In A Room - Two People In A Room (2011)

(ambient / drone)

There are moments in your life when the world comes to complete halt. It seems like everything around you turns into slow motion, the clocks stop from turning and your movements become as intricate as the instincts of a highly fragile being. Your touch becomes light, yet smooth as silk, as your fingers run on the bare back muscles of the person lying next to you. The room is empty - normally there would be furniture, pictures, mirrors, everything you can find in a normal room. Yet, this day is simply not normal. You are the only two elements in the room and there is nothing else.

Two People In A Room  is a Berlin-based ambient/drone duo formed by Michelle Hughes & René Margraff in September 2009. I had never heard of them until this album, which captured a certain day of my life instantly. Ambient music needs to be very descriptive in order to penetrate into the unconscious of the listener. There are no vocals, barely any melodies even. The music needs to create an atmosphere so vivid that it fills the entire room with its spirit, yet it must go unnoticed as the shadows over a dirt path - it cannot interfere with your thought process.

Side By Side and Crash Your Plane, Walk Away begin the album off by processing through 20 minutes of your life to absorb you into the world the rest of the album will create. The occasional sounds of the guitar combined with the hum in the background create a stagnant feeling and leave you immobilized for a moment. The feeling is lost throughout the slow chord progression of Holiday On Air Force One, which creeps up to its climax without never really reaching it, leaving the listener hoping for something never to come.

The album is not a flawless mixture of ambient sounds but it manages to grasp the single feeling of being alone with someone in a room. Inside the room the world revolved around you, you are the world. As solid as the album is, I felt no addiction towards it. Two People In A Room set the bait well but forgot to plant the hook inside it.