Natural Snow Buildings

Since 1998 · France

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The Winter Ray (2004)

The Winter Ray is the duo's first sprawl on the scale they would become known for -- a self-released double album of twenty-five pieces that moves between two-minute fragments and seventeen-minute drones without ever changing its weather. Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte record everything at home, and the tape hiss and room noise are part of the composition rather than a limitation of it. "Dead Horses" and "I Was Always Cold" are the long pieces the record is built around, while "Overture" and the title track work as the brief clearings between them. Issued in a tiny hand-assembled edition, it established the method every later Natural Snow Buildings record refines.

Sleeve notes

Natural Snow Buildings

The Winter Ray · 2004

Natural Snow Buildings are Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, a French duo who have worked in near-total isolation since 1998, releasing long, drone-heavy records in editions small enough that the music circulated mostly by reputation. Their sound sits between free folk and drone — acoustic guitar, bowed strings, harmonium and voice, recorded at home and allowed to run far past conventional album length. The pieces work less like songs than like weather systems, melodies surfacing out of the haze and receding back into it.

The duo are unusually resistant to naming influences. Asked directly, they have said their music is open to any influence, listing sources from France, Sudan, Ethiopia, India, the USA, Japan and Indonesia rather than a set of records. When they have named names, the list runs to Kath Bloom, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Neil Young, Six Organs of Admittance, Charalambides, Alice Coltrane and Stars of the Lid, with Fursaxa singled out as a genuine influence. The Winter Ray (2004) set the template — a self-released double album long enough to function as an environment — and The Dance of the Moon and the Sun (2006) is the record that carried it furthest and turned a hand-assembled CD-R operation into a cult concern. Most of that early catalogue has since been reissued digitally under the duo's own NSB Archive imprint.