Gay porn for beginners, all nice and grainy and purely auditory, even the most inflexible straight gal can keep up. Jake Muir invites you to the sauna with his »Bathhouse Blues«, dress code: biceps and chesthair. Comparisons with Patrick Cowley are easy to make and not entirely inaccurate. The Berliner-by-choice’s sound has the same glamour as his Bay Area godfather, but remains ambient through and through. The genesis of the album actually began three years ago with a high-profile mix on which Muir fused tracks by Kelman Duran, DJ Olive, Daniel Lanois and Terre Thaemlitz over snippets of vintage man-on-man porn. The mix is a great success, a second one follows and an album is made. This has now been released on Sferic, the label of the moment, and the makers have every right to write a mission statement on their banner that should read »renewers of ambient«. After the rather incredible Yungwebster album, which finally pulled the last rug from under feet of mumble rap, »Bathhouse Blues« is also ambient but in a new guise. That’s because this sound design isn’t looking for the farthest horizon, but for the greatest drama imaginable without a pulse. This attempt has its limits, as can be heard here. Where the mixes always featured new instruments plus, of course, drums to create tension, here it just sticks with the wafting, like steam in the sauna, with no meat. A criticism if you take the mixes as a measure of things. Without it, one could simply call it one of the year’s most outstanding ambient albums.
Bathhouse Blues
