About Celer

Celer is the sound, visual, literary, and artistic endeavor of the husband and wife duo of Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long. Danielle was a teacher of special education and music therapy, a seasoned and published writer of poetry and prose, a painter, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist, also recording as Chubby Wolf. She had an extensive background in Gender Studies, Education, Basque History, Photography, and Tibetan Studies, as well as having lived in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, …

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Reviews:

Best of 2010 Lists:
Tim David Brice, Headphone Commute, Igloo Magazine

Celer is a husband and wife team duo made up of Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long. In an intimate fashion, they present music that is fitting of the quiet genre. Stillness is overbearing on this 50 minute release. Quiet is in fact an understatement as the majority of the record needs to be listened to with the volume stuck near the high end of the spectrum or otherwise, the listener looses out on the intricate beauty of the whole movement of the music. Made exclusively with vintage analog synth and a mixing board, the recording was made without any overdubs or production gimmickry. Nothing much happens through the realm of the eight pieces on the record. There are no peaks, valleys or sudden, excessive blasts that surprise the listener, but this is exactly the point. The beauty lies in the stillness and overwhelming serenity of the moving synth crescendos. Sadly enough, Danielle passed away suddenly in July 2009, making the record take on a new meaning. New works are due to be published over the course of time. Life will go on. “Dying Star” will stand the testament of time as a quiet record that saw a creative duo make music that is pure, poignant, moving and filled with peace.
– Flashes of Timeless Joy

Dying Star finds Celer at their most sonically depleted, with only a vintage analogue synthesizer and a mixing board – all field recordings, bells and bows, and string-driven things removed. Further compounding this unwonted parsimony of means, it was entirely improvised, with no post-processing intervention from Will and Dani. The depletion is willed (pun intended), a subtle purpose evident in this, for what transpires is possessed of a fragility suggestive of impermanence, an attenuation redolent of mortality. Dying Star sets out in the softest of synth tones, hovering, wavering gently, subsequently adopting approximations to instrument voicings (organ, strings) in liminal rise-fall swell-relent cadences. After slowly hoving into ear-view, each part slowly wanes, barely making its presence felt enough to be said to have waxed, before ceding to the next. Its eventlessness is deceptive, though, for emergent strata are discernible on digging deeper; here a dimming, there a lightening of timbre – maybe an overtone or a tintinnabulation; as in “On the Edges of Each Season” (clip below), which nurtures the formation of a tonal cluster and lower end promptings. And the gradual waning occurring as each piece reaches closure is a notable leitmotif – a thing of great delicacy, an evacuated beauty purposively recurring so that a faraway starburst at the start of the closing “Flickers (Goodnight)” incides with all the more resonance. The likes of Discourses of the Withered and Engaged Touches, with their widescreen ambient and neo-symphonic lushness, are a far cry from this discreet music of miniatures, of ebb and flow of subdued wave forms. Yet the album gradually works its lowlight spell, its chronostatic scenes snaring a sense of the “completely pure and secluded” sought by Will Long, that “stands as a fading presentation of memory, time, and loss, set against the ending day.”
– Igloo Magazine

Avec Dying Star de Celer (Will Long et Danielle Baquet-Long), les codes de l’écurie Dragon’s Eye Recordings sont respectés : on est ici dans une ambient diaphane. C’est délicat et ça se contente d’une note et de ses variantes automnales. Mais, le soleil de la pochette nous aveuglant, impossible d’y reconnaître la moindre identité.
– le son du Grisli

Despite its more than partial dissimilarity from the genre’s originator’s sonorities, this CD would surely be approved by the very Brian Eno as a precious emblem of the influence of his actions on the new breed of artists inhabiting contiguous sonic districts. The Longs exclusively utilized an analogue synthesizer and a mixing board to concretize eight tracks of mind-comforting, daydreaming soundscapes whose depth is directly proportional to their structural plainness. The gentleness of these placidly wavering masses is priceless; mostly, they’re shaped by the layering of major chords with added hues that alter them just a tiny bit, leaving the fundamental texture perceptible. The music calmly establishes its incidence in the psyche, neither cheerfully not dismally. A suspended state that goes on for almost 50 minutes, the perfect complement for an environment of unspoken reflection or quietly meticulous activity.
– Touching Extremes

Risalgono invece al 2008 le incisioni pubblicate nel secondo. In questo caso la scelta strumentale si orienta su mezzi ridotti, solo un sintetizzatore analogico e un mixer attraverso i quali vengono veicolati suoni flebilissimi, a tratti solo intuibili (consigliato l’ascolto in cuffia con volume limitato all’ottanta per cento della potenza), a stabilire un dialogo d’intimità con l’ascoltatore. (7)
– Blow Up Magazine

Illuminating a young Los Angeles label with one of the brightest sparks from their obscene post-production derailment, Celer share the carefully-prepared ‘Dying Star’ with even more careful instructions to emphasize the most-delicate nature of this release. Appropriately prompted with a liner notes quote from Merleau-Ponty, the music can best, perhaps only, be articulated phenomenologically, as a sensual experience not to be reduced or rationalized to its technical, conceptual, or informational core. Improvised without edit from analog synthesizer and mixer, the sound is as sparse yet engrossing as those “no-input” works which appear now and again, with droning hues of electromagnetism which barely register when listened to with a hand on the volume knob (in my mind, though not theirs, the better way to appreciate the disc). But rather than read into the machine-soul as so many such works provoke us to do, these emotive sounds do no more than that, selecting – not describing – a feeling, and then paired to an individual’s sentiment in perfect little micro-poems (“How I Imagine My Hand Holds Yours”, “On The Edges Of Each Season”, “I Could Almost Disperse”). Though the focus of each track seems to strike at the same point in the ear (i.e. the same emotion, the same sentiment) – and the blending together is hardly a distraction – the tracks vary widely in length. Though it may be claimed these are to encapsulate each fleeting (that is, to different degrees) feeling, it strikes me that the impression is already made, and doubly quick with the very effective titling scheme. Rather, I think the longer durations belong wholly to the authors, who linger (some may say over-interested, and therefore narcissistically), doubling the experience by already feeling for us.
– Animal Psi

Dying Star might be the purest Celer recording to date, though such a claim might seem questionable given the degree of purity that characterizes every release issued by Will Long and the late Danielle Baquet-Long under their project name. But consider: Dying Star was realized using nothing more than a vintage analog synthesizer and mixing board—no field recordings or instrument sound sources of the kind heard on other Celer recordings found their way into the recording process. Adding to the recording’s ascetic design, the eight-part work was completely improvised, and no overdubs or post-processing were involved either when it was recorded in the fall of 2008. In keeping with its elegiac title, the work exudes an hermetic and retiring character that can’t help but make it feel like gesture of mourning or requiem for the premature passing of Danielle and the eventual end to the Celer project itself—a memento mori, in other words (in Celer’s own words, the recording “stands as a fading presentation of memory, time, and loss, set against the ending day”); the track title used for the work’s longest part, the eleven-minute “I Imagine My Hand Holds Yours” would appear to confirm as much. As such, Dying Star unspools at a low volume level—the recommendation is included that one should listen to it via headphones with the volume set to eighty percent—with each graceful part appearing and slowly fading away, clearing a space for the next one to repeat the pattern. Throughout the recording’s fifty minutes, soft string- and whistling, organ-like tones rise and fall and advance and recede, often at levels that are so close to inaudible they create a level of tension that’s interestingly at odds with Dying Star’s overall peaceful character. The gradual withering away that occurs as each part moves towards its close proves, in fact, to be one of the most exquisite things about the recording, and the degree of detail is so purifed that the tiny starburst that appears at the start of the closing part, “Flickers (Goodnight),” has a far greater impact than such a small accent would otherwise have.
– Textura

Творческая деятельность «Celer» была окончательно приостановлена в июле 2009 года, но до сих пор продолжают выходить работы этого американского дуэта, коих накопилось, надо думать, еще на пятилетку вперед. Материал «Dying Star» бы записал осенью 2008 года и необычен, прежде всего, тем минимумом инструментов, с помощью которых были созданы эти восемь треков. Обычно Дэниель и Вилльям Лонг использовали звучание пианино, скрипок, флейт, полевые записи и прочие найденные звуки, замедляя их и перемешивая до состояния полной статики, но в этот раз у них в руках оказались только старый аналоговый синтезатор и микшерный пульт. Нельзя сказать, что полученный результат чем-то особенно отличается от прочих, весьма многочисленных работ дуэта – погружение в их обширную дискографию позволяет сделать выводы, что столь замечательные образцы неоклассики, привкус трайбл-эстетики и реверансы в сторону Брайна Ино и Стива Роача, явленные на таких, не побоюсь этого слова, шедеврах, как «The Everything And The Nothing» и «Engaged Touches», представлены в творчестве супругов скорее как приятные неожиданности и мимолетные эксперименты, а так звучание «Celer», что здесь, что в девяносто процентах их записей, тяготеет к минималистичному, неторопливому эмбиенту, манипуляциям с одинокой звуковой волной, неторопливо изгибаемой и преобразуемой на фоне тишины. Разбивка на композиции весьма условна – все фрагменты альбома перетекают один в другой, не прерываются ни на секунду, являя миру монолитную вещь, полностью передающую в своем звучании название альбома и служащую отличным саундтреком для заката, запечатленного на обложке. Однотонные звуки проносятся мимо, иногда заползая на территорию высоких и неуютных частот (впрочем, это фирменный прием музыкантов), иногда срываясь на вибрацию, но при этом все равно создают вокруг слушателя располагающую, «интимную атмосферу» – надо только запастись хорошими наушниками и отгородится от реальности. Да, еще хорошо, чтобы в окна падали лучи заходящего солнца, остывая и растворяясь в темноте вместе с последними звуками «Flickers». Если подобные эксперименты со звучанием не вызывают у вас стойкое отторжение (вроде бы не должны), то этот релиз подойдет вам стопроцентно.

Celer comprised by husband and wife Will Long and Danielle Basquet-Long formed in 2004 with a string of releases, remixes and compilation appearances in several independent labels in North America, Europe and Japan. Danielle was involved in education, poetry, painter and she was music-instrumentalist and vocalist. She passed away in July 2009. Will is a published writer. “Dying Star” was recorded in 2008 and it was an improvisation work using an analog synthesizer with no overdubs and post-processing. The album is recorded in a very low volume and the waves of drones spread out through an endless soundtrack of a perfect setting for the end of the day.
– Loop

Stasis is an exciting musical tool. If used in the best sense, stasis is what makes ambient music connect to the that place where mind, soul and heart of the listener connect and starts to vibrate there. Maybe this is the reason, why a lot of people like to fall asleep to ambient music of this kind, and to give you a little glimpse into my private sphere, there is a special stack of CDs that are all collected for the purpose of supporting a gentle slide into slumber. I like sleeping a lot, by the way (another glimpse into my privacy for you – seems as if I am laying my bare soul open to you here…) because it is cheap, refreshing and provides good health. But sleeping is not the only static motion there is. Watching a swarm of little insects that move in wild, erratic and unpredictable moves but nevertheless the whole swarm seems to stay put over a certain place. The endless instream of waves at the beach. The endless hum of cars on the motorway, especially at night, looking down from the eleventh floor at the traffic below.

Celer use nothing but one analogue synthesizer and a mixing board to open up a single wave of sound, which nevertheless opens into a multitude of layers once you have immersed yourself in them, that flow gently and almost without movement from the back to the forth and back again in your mind. There is a reason they recommend headphones and low volume. It seems as if nothing at all is happening most of the time. As if time itself stands still and there is no tomorrow to come. Even though there are a couple of specifically named titles on here, it does sound like one big track of echoing and flowing sound. One hour of tranquility of this kind helps me to re-charge my energy levels for another week of stress, toil and schedules. Leaning back, feeling the soft wind around my head, the sun on my clothes, the sounds of a distant church bell and of somebody working in the kitchen through the headphones, is just a perfect moment. Thank you, whoever contributed to it, from Celer to the people near and distant and finally to nature itself for adding a constant hum and rustle. (no thanks go out to the Austrian airforce who likes to use Sunday noon for training flights…)

There is a tragic story to Celer, which I thought about leaving out of this review, as it may seem like I am trying my first steps into low brow writing and sensational journalism, but which cannot be left out once the people behind Celer are presented. Danielle Baquet-Long and Will Long were a couple and produced these intimate, subtle and sensitive pieces together, until Danielle Baquet-Long died of heart failure in 2009. Which ended Celer, but as there are still a lot of works and recordings unpublished, there is more to come I am sure. As the idea of losing someone you love is about the worst thing imaginable to me, I want to refrain from speculations about how deep and intimate relationships may also shape the music that is produced in such a constellation. It can be felt. 3 Seconds of Air (the new project by Vidna Obmana aka Fear Falls Burning) has a similar constellation plus a close friend on the second guitar. It adds something. But losing the fundaments of this, of course, puts an end to this as well.

Death is impossible to think about and even harder to come to terms with (excluding the decision to ignore it). Any good art carries with it at least a small dose something beyond our regular lives, something of the eternal mysteries of life itself (birth, death, the fact of a living, breathing nature,…) which might either be tackled philosophically or spiritually. Both are the same amount helpless. The title “dying star”, the cover showing a sundown or song titles such as “I could almost disperse” or “how I imagine my hand holds yours” put more context to the situation. It is a wonderful thing to listen to these pieces and let your mind flow steadily, remembering experiences and people past and present.
– Cracked

Celer is the musical offspring of Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long, a husband and wife whose posthumous discography now runs into the dozens. Typically their ethereal drones are composed from highly processed recordings of environmental sound or acoustic instruments such as piano, violin and flute. Their recent album on Dragon’s Eye, Dying Star, is both one of their most subdued sonically, and one of the sparsest in sonic origins, using only an analog synthesizer and a mixing board. Granted, analog synthesizers can produce a wide variety of sound, but the sound world here is remarkably consistent, a steady pitch with gently hovering overtones. Volume is generally low and events are few, a thinning or thickening of the harmonic texture and an occasional ringing emphasis in the overtones. The surface calm and relative homogeneity seems especially apt for an album entitled Dying Star.

Although the album is divided into eight tracks, there is only subtle audible differences to distinguish them in the listener’s ear. Celer often uses track boundaries for purposes other than delineating musical divisions, and the track titles read like one of the poems that have graced other albums or Celer’s blog. Track boundaries are an unusual playground for sound artists. The Hafler Trio, in its long search to challenge perception, released CDs where the track layout didn’t correspond in the slightest to the sequence of individual pieces. But I don’t think this is Celer’s motivation, which almost seems more like an acknowledgment of the essential disordered quality of the spiritual and emotional states presented by their music.

Yet despite the seeming placidity of the Dying Star’s trajectory, the album’s most poignant moment comes at the beginning of the final track. Flickers (Goodnight) is the only track that doesn’t begin in silence, but instead is crossfaded directly from its predecessor. Even more significant, its continuing drone is overlaid with the only two even mildly percussive events, aptly characterized by the flickers in the track title, coming at the very beginning of the track and echoed about forty seconds in. These two events, so quiet as to be barely suggested, and appearing only after forty minutes of quiet undulating drones, are Dying Star’s hidden treasure. Is it the dying star finally imploding, creating a brief flash all too easily overlooked? Has the listener drifted into an oblivious somnolence and heard it only in his or her dreams? Celer makes a call to the listener’s attention and imagination and thereby elevates this release to one of their best.
– Clasical Drone

Late one evening, about two weeks ago, i & the Beloved found ourselves high on a hillside in Cornwall. The wild moorland in this far southwest corner of England is characterised by precisely two things: vast granite slabs that put the ‘rude’ into protrude, & even bigger stone mines & chimneys, their ruins peppering the landscape with almost amusing prevalence. Caught between the twin immensities of nature & industry, it’s a beautiful, evocative place, & as we explored one particular ruin (behold), the day literally began to die around us. Across on the west side of the valley, the sun began to set, becoming a fiery bronze circle in the sky. From the time it first touched the fringes of the hilled horizon to finally being absorbed within it can only have been a few minutes, but the magic of the moment made it impossibly longer, stretching each second in order that our senses might be able to savour their passin.

Upon my return home, Celer’s latest release, Dying Star, was waiting for me, the listening experience of which takes me straight back to that Cornish hillside. It’s not just the title, or even the overt sunset shown on the cover; this is emphatically evening music, perfectly capturing the sense of things passing, closing, readying themselves for sleep. Appropriately, Will & Dani’s drones are more reserved than usual, kept at a distance by their unwavering calm & dynamic softness (Will recommends listening with the volume at 80%; do it, it works perfectly). This aspect especially—the resolve to keep the material a hovering mezzo-piano throughout—is bold & impressive (i’m reminded of advice given to me many years ago: if you really want to get an audience’s attention, play increasingly quietly; loud music can be—& is—more doggedly ignored); there’s ever the sense that, at any moment, the music might just pass away completely, which makes the minutes we are given—&, generously, Celer give us nearly 50 of them—all the more tantalising & significant (track title “I could almost disperse” says it all). & that is what continues to be most remarkable thing about Celer’s œuvre: the astonishing way that such radically pared-down material is nonetheless so miraculously full of life & energy, so emotional & allusive. The more one listens to their drones, the less they sound like such, seemingly filled to bursting with ebb & flow, gentle eddies & currents worrying the material at some fathomless depth; from this perspective, moments of slight but noticeable change—such as the exquisite opening of the fourth track, “On the Edges of Each Season”, with its insistent growing cluster & deep, only half-perceptible rumbling bass—become almost shockingly novel.

Dying Star simply isn’t just another Celer release; its quietly massive majesty betrays incredibly deft artistry & bespeaks a profound creative maturity. This album may just be Celer’s masterpiece.
– 5:4

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reviewing a reissue of Celer’s ‘Engaged Touches’ on Home Normal – that album was, for me, something of a revelation as I had never before heard their work and was astonished by its sheer elegant beauty…

I was, then, thrilled to have before me a new album to review – ‘Dying Star’ on Dragon’s Eye Recordings.

From the outset, it’s clear that ‘Dying Star’ is an entirely different approach to ambient music than that found on ‘Engaged Touches’. The sonic palette is reduced to the most minimal of elements – a single vintage synthesiser and mixing board (so the accompanying notes tell me). Gone too is the epic musicality of ‘Engaged Touches’- which was reminiscent of Stars of the Lid’s best work- and in its place are washes of vague and almost illusory ambience – undefined and restless, creating a forever morphing, ebbing and fading field of sound.

Owing to the structural and sonic similarity of the tracks, ‘Dying Star’ creates the impression of being a single piece of music rather than an album composed of individual tracks. The album flows, one piece into the next with indistinguishable beginnings and endings, feeling like an intentional aural modelling of the imperceptible liminal boundary of night and day alluded to in the album’s title. The results are, needless to say, mesmerising and haunting.

The apparent simplicity of the music should not be confused with a poverty of ideas, nor should it be assumed that such sparse arrangements betray a lack of musical nous. Celer have proved, over their extensive discography, that they have a rich and certain grasp of the conceptual terrain of ambient music and have explored every inch of it. ‘Dying Star’ should be taken as but one exploratory emission from within their oeuvre rather than a definitive statement of intent.

To my mind the album isn’t as strong as some of their other output, but I feel that, somehow, “strength” isn’t what is intended to be conveyed here. The hazy ganzfeld-like experimentation delivered through the album’s eight tracks is to be consumed almost incidentally as a subtle augmentation of naturally occurring waking dreams. This is true ambient music – to be enjoyed as an integrated part of the surroundings rather than attended to with focussed intent – and in this context, you couldn’t ask for a better example of the art.
– Fluid Radio

It seems all too ordinary at first: an organic drone fading in and gently rising and falling over the course of several minutes. But then something changes, not in the music but in the listeners. Perhaps a period of tuning in is required; perhaps the music is simply too powerful to ignore. Eventually one succumbs to its spell. It is possible to find oneself drifting off and away from it, only to be gradually, gently, drawn back into the intimate drone.

Dying Star, recorded in 2008, is the result of an improvisation on a vintage analogue synth. The title and the cover artwork refer to the setting of the sun, although it could be the sun itself which is a slowly dying star. (Don’t worry, we still have a few million years before we need to get concerned.) The very mention of dying gives the record a further dimension, whether intentional or not, as Celer ended with the tragic early death of Danielle Baquet-Long last year. Her husband and musical partner Will Long is overseeing a lengthy release schedule of recordings by the duo, although it is doubtful all of them would have seen the light of day had Danielle not passed away; they would still be making new music together, making some of it available and stock-piling tapes not deemed ready for release. But this is not to be, and we must celebrate her life through the work rather than reflect on what might have been.

The album gradually unveils its magic; not much changes throughout the duration, even in comparison to other works in the Celer discography. The drone – a sort of luminescent, orangey hum – rises and falls across a few tones in pieces of varying length. Whether a track is three minutes or 11 does not really make any difference. One feels as if any of the pieces could stretch out to infinity, providing a protective cushion against the outside world. It is a work that could settle into the background but every so often, in different places at different times, there is a moment that reaches out and grabs the ears.

This is a breathtakingly beautiful work, and perhaps it is reading too much of the duo’s biography to describe as at times almost overwhelmingly sad. However, this is the listener’s influence on the music, in much the same way that rock fans begin re-interpreting the lyrics of a Buckley or a Morrison because of their early deaths; surely the mystery is hidden in their work somewhere? Well, sorry, but no. Celer did not make this album with any thought of the future, or of dying – they were a young couple, newly married and in love and to impose anything deeper on the album is unnecessary, because this is an album that transcends any outside influence and just is. As the album fades out to silence (the closing track is much quieter than what has preceded it), one is warmed by the fuzzy glow it leaves and grateful to those who made it.
– The Silent Ballet

Diese Improvisation auf Analogsynthesizer entstand im Herbst 2008, ein knappes Jahr, bevor mit Danielle Baquet-Long die weibliche Hälfte von Celer jung gestorben ist. Will Long hält die Erinnerung an die wenigen gemeinsamen Jahre wach mit einer Musik, die sich ganz dem Moment und der Intuition hingibt. Der im nach Innen lauschenden Miteinander entstandene Dreamscape verbreitet vor diesem Hintergrund ein besonderes intensives Gefühl von Vergänglichkeit und Sonnenuntergang. Gedämpfter geht es kaum. Man soll mit Kopfhörer ebenfalls nach Innen lauschen. Was da summt, ist kaum mehr als ein Hauch, der leise und leicht die Befindlichkeit tönt und trübt. Die wenigen Modulationen in pianissimo und piano sind dröhnminimalistischer, diskreter und ereignisloser als alles, was Brian Eno je geschaffen hat, nur ein geisterhafter Schatten selbst des besonders ruhigen Thursday Afternoon. Die Hör- und zugleich Selbsterfahrung ließe sich nur noch durch Floating in einem Iso-Tank überbieten. Die hauchzarten Schwebwellen geben einem wahrhaftig ‚The Feeling Of Trancing Through A Silent Expanse‘, eine geisterhafte Körperlosigkeit, die es erlaubt, sich molekular mit allem zu mischen: ‚I Could Almost Disperse‘.
– Bad Alchemy Magazin

Recorded towards the end of 2008 using only a vintage analogue synthesizer and a mixing board, Dying Star is an eight-part, fifty-minute work from drone purists Celer, whose inscrutable discography continues to expand at a healthy rate. The accompanying notes state that the motivation behind these pieces was to create something rooted in improvisation that captured a sense of being “completely pure and secluded”, that “stands as a fading presentation of memory, time, and loss, set against the ending day”. Typical of this act’s elusive, understated output, Dying Star is mastered at a very low volume – something that encourages cranked up headphone listening. Once your playback levels are adjusted accordingly, the continuous ebb and flow of warm tones proves powerfully immersive and crystalises itself at key moments of self-contained loveliness – in particular the eleven-minute ‘How I Imagine My Hand Holds Yours’ which seems to be the most dynamic and well-rounded track of the bunch. Never ones to employ excessively showy or contrived techniques, Celer continue to very quietly excel in their field by hinting at the elegant simplicity of early electronic drone music.
– Boomkat