Press for Diminished Composition
"Stunning minimal classical ambient… gorgeous textured tones manifested with melancholic precision and restrain… an incredible intimate close listening experience… like Stars of the Lid's triple LPs neatly condensed into nine four-minute etudes immaculately presented. Emerging as a shoo-in for the best ambient album of the year, or past few years for that matter." - PSI Lab
"…there is a semblance of a narrative, a sense of the cinematic, as the faintly rendered samples evoke longing and heartbreak. These compositions are deceptively simple, with sound textures playing such a key role that the sublime details are easy to overlook. Brushstrokes of drone are applied with deftness to a sonically eroded canvas… [they] paint serene soundscapes in layers of warm tones. Understated and unadorned, Diminished Composition erodes beautifully, then invites listeners to survey the ruins." - Exclaim
"…scenes painted in warm tones, strokes of drone deftly drawn… It unfolds with expansive cords and resonant strings under analog tape grain, further focused and refined, with all the melancholic ellipticism that has distinguished Willamette among contemporary ambient post-classicists." - Igloo Magazine
"Listening to Willamette is like floating on a quiescent sea fed by confluence of warm ambient drones, ephemeral textures, and soothing timbres woven from piano, strings, and voice. It is impeccable in its construction, uncompromising in its patient commitment to stillness, and awash in tender emotion and an overwhelming sense of nostalgia… melancholy and minimalism in perfect balance, exquisitely rendered." - Stationary Travels
"…reminiscent of Stars of the Lid's orchestral motions, like a fog breaking over hills… fragile tape loops, hushed and disjointed whisperings lost in a sea of tape hiss, piano drones and stringed oscillations, pushing this softly insistent love out in mesmerizing waves. This return to life feels jaded as much as it feels empowered, lost in emotional limbo and complicated sonic uncertainty as it erodes itself back into existence… this is one of the best hiatus breakers I've heard yet." - Hearfeel
"Naming the record Diminished Composition is a mission statement - a business card that summarizes comprehensively what can be expected… orchestral, enveloping and gently melancholy." - Music Will Not Save You (translated from Italian)
"The unseeing cosmos breathes out and gives birth to the music, something that’s aeons old and yet forever young. Pillars of dust gently touch the cloudy surface of the echoing, swelling drone… the record has a healthy, rosy colour to its cheeks. A harmonious aura surrounds its angelic sound, and it surrounds it completely, like a halo… the soul of the music is postclassical, but the deep, layered textures never dissolve, depriving the music of placing two feet in the strictly classical genre. Its sighing sound has been around for a long time. A clear mind and open mind perfume the drone, and otherworldly moments of untainted, everlasting tranquility wash up on the aural shores. As the record disappears, you start to feel a little alone. That’s what Diminished Composition does to you; it enters your being and shares its heart with you, its dark romance weaving in and around your life." - Fluid Radio
"...suffused and delicate ambient/post-classical textures." - Son of Marketing
"Deployed across the gaps of silence and the lost shadows of old recordings, Willamette weaves tenuous connections between space and time. Reviving fragile whispers of the past with washes of strings patched in memory, voice and resonant piano notes draped in dust, it seems to flow into the fringes of the elusive… sweet archaic breathing…" - SWQW (Translated from French)
"…ethereal… a perfect synthesis of this short and intense sensory journey." - So What (translated from Italian)
"…preferring quality over quantity… these compositions take us into a dreamy and cinematic universe… peaceful and controlled… highly recommended." - Dive Into Sun (translated from French)
"… beautiful… ephemeral… solemn and dreamy…" - Linus Records (translated from Japanese)
"…there's no looseness to these recollections; they're compact, crystalline, and upon each repeat listen, they loop through the same contours. The songs on Diminished Composition seem, for me, to function as carefully carved affective ciphers; individual rooms in a crumbling memory palace that can be visited and revisited… prevailing throughout Composition is something more wedded to classical composition—a style given to control and constraint. There’s no drifting here, no navel-gazing, and each yawning tone and wind-bitten crackle takes its place in Composition’s careful arc. Stumbling through its mist of sense-impressions, glancing down its corridors, I lay back and let its tides move me forward. I’ve been here before, and I’ll be back again." - The Operative
"…incredible… like an echo of someone else's romantic songs…" - VK (translated from Russian)
"…vibrant neoclassicism giving as much importance to the movements as the silences between them." - dMute (translated from French)
"…graceful post-classical ambient drone.. blissful miniatures… subtle movements of dreamy melancholy." - DJ Away KZSU Standford 90.1 FM
"…romantic…notes are repeated, but not always the same…" - SoWhat (translated from Italian)
"Willamette is one of these groups that you secretly keep to yourself rather jealously, as a fragile treasure that could be tarnished if he fell into the wrong hands. Diminished Composition takes us slowly - very slowly - in flowing, soothing territories… Large spaces full of silence… Willamette transforms our relationship with time…" - AlphaBeta Magazine (translated from French)
"In cinematic vapours, Willamette orchestrates another way of being… whispering and haunting - the meandering of a gentle, archaic breath." - L'sombre Sur la Mesure (translated from French)
"Very sensitive listening from a project keenly aware of themselves and their output." - Hearfeel (Best of 2016 review)
"…warm drone… focused… well-executed string and piano work." - AminoApps
"An electro-acoustic gem… experimenting with distant sounds, dreams of memory, nostalgic
echoes…" - Amoeba
"… airy, distant vocals and melancholic string sections, all blanketed by hypnotic drones… captivating… minimalistic and nostalgic. Diminished Composition represents another triumph for Willamette." - On Dit Magazine
Press for Always in Postscript
"Always in Postscript displays indeed a mesmerising sense of distance and disconnected melancholy that, like Echo Park, borders on mournfulness but also delineate different emotional territories altogether…Willamette again display a rare talent for setting up a mood or a diffuse atmosphere at a completely unhurried pace and with utter simplicity and effortless impact. The tape hiss and vinyl crackles that subtly envelops the overall sound palette certainly allude to badly kept Polaroids as a way to suggest a disconnection with the past. Things, places and people that inhabit the past are just considered for what they used to be. Always in Postscript feels like visiting our own story without being affected by it anymore, what used to be real is now nothing more than an abandoned house. As each track conjures painful and difficult memories, their quiet and calm beauty suddenly transform the silence of empty rooms into a liberating and wonderful experience." - Fluid Radio
"…the songs are elevated past the point of sweeping elegance. They make an impression… by calling attention to composition as well as to tone." - A Closer Listen
"…first foray into the world of film, these compositions [are] at the intersection of classical and ambient…beautiful… sublime… concise…" - Autres Directions (translated from French)
"Chamber drone caught in perpetually Lynchian state of romantic, dream-fog rapture" - Spin
"…decaying dreamscapes built up from tapes, strings, and dense ambient textures and infused with nostalgia - romantic music for the ambient soundscape era." - Textura
"…a winter-still sense of finality and remembrance through a minimal selection of blurred tape loops and subdued orchestration. Often it's the suggested elements of Willamette's composition that help Always in Postscript sidestep the expected Stars of the Lid comparisons, while still providing an insular soundtrack to devote our memories to… austere but romantic…" - Skeleton Crew Quarterly
"…there's a really dark heaviness to parts of this album…" - The Needle Drop
"These tracks are very minimal atmospheric affairs… heavy drone…" - Patricksmusicblog
"Wonderfully simple." - Nillson (translated from German)
"Possessing the same graceful touch, light and refinement of a Degas… with the intimacy and vulnerability of a Lucien Freud…residue of ghosts leave their trace in objects and artefacts within these echoing rooms, Willamette successfully capture this stirring intensity, rendering a gracefully architected work through these wonderfully minimal, yet cavernous pieces." - Future Sequence
"Time and space seem to have actually been suspended in their symphonic work… detailed textures combining modern and classical orchestration…" - Pinkushion (translated from French)
"… sounds, snatches of melody and unrecognizable sound… moments of recognition and also immediate evaporation and dissolution into silence… lots of silence." - Dwars (translated from Dutch)
"Always in Postscript seems to me more than a soundtrack…post-coma, romantic and out of this world…" - Ambient Churches (translated from French)
"… heavenly, supremely beautiful." - Pastel Records (translated from Japanese)
" … unassuming at first, but grows with time and infects the listener with emotive swells…" - The Silent Ballet
"Beautiful… simple… fit for the winter air." - Deathcar (translated from Japanese)
"… a gorgeous piece of music that captures the ideas of solitude and longing… the band shows its values not just in the sounds they are creating but in the silence that underlays each note. They understand the importance that space and silence can provide.. and use this to their advantage… just plain beautiful." - Earmilk
"[Willamette] have a romantic approach to melancholy, quite sensitive and minimal… they mostly seem to rival with themselves, achieving and completing the most precise expression of their emotions and not really caring about using artifacts in order to impress. The more you listen attentively to their music, the more it seems… rich, steadfast, deep and breathtaking." - Derives Webzine
"Always in Postscript is an album of contrasts, a musical illustration of infinitely large spaces…" - Fictionalize
"Willamette's music is three-dimensional, folded in many layers… despite the monolithic atmosphere ala The Caretaker, you suddenly hear Satie, Gershwin or Eno… the Cocteau Twins playing quietly in the next room…" - We Want War (translated from Czech)
"Willamette make gushing ambient music that's equal parts Lynchian shadow-hunting, hyper-romantic slow-dancing, and uneasy eavesdropping - think Lana Del Rey's "Blue Velvet" cover extended into two 15-minute sides of a 10-inch. A hazy curtain framing pianos, strings, flapping tape, and shuffling room noise, they're like Stars of the Lid open to chance compositon." - Spin (Best 15 Avant Albums of 2012 review)
"In a genre that thrives on texture and restraint, they show remarkable poise." - Kyle Carney
"Enormous drone… a tremendous album." - Sonyudum (translated from Turkish)
"Beautiful, timeless drone..." - TapeFear
"Willamette has captured the soul of the room…" - Mankind Innocence (translated from French)
"…concise… working in small chunks, it is really beautiful…" - Field Tracker
"Heartbreaking… as exquisite a piece of nostalgic romantic melancholy as you're ever going to hear. The crackle of old vinyl introduces waves of electronically treated chamber music. It drags emotions up onto the beach and then recedes, leaving behind only a few grains of sand brought back from the deep." - Doklands
"Always in Postscript is a unique and haunting collection… Whispering textural waves of melody blow across the recording, slowly and delicately, flourished by passing notes from cello or piano… this is music for uninhabited spaces—for vacancy… Dipping its toes into the silence of whiteness." - Flaunt Magazine
"Spacious melodies of piano and string… exquisitely beautiful and nostalgic…" - P*dis (translated from Japanese)
Press for Echo Park
"... a set of dust-blown elegies of doleful mien. [Willamette's] work operate at the interstices of space and volume, with their quasi-classical cadences offering... an emotional and musico-cultural ethos." - Further Noise
"So calm, so sad and so beautiful." - Yawning (Japan)
"Gorgeous." - Own Records
"A superb album full of ethereal ambience, organic calmness and infinite silence." - Deer Diary
"A lesson in the art of antique atmospheres, subtle, beautiful string arrangements and distant, droning memories." - A Strangely Isolated Place
"Very pleasant, slightly melancholy." - An Ant-Social Experiment
"A beautiful release... best of 2011." - Adriano E. Steves (Collectables)
"… an album of diffuse splendour, plaintive sketches, and beautiful, wistful melancholia… all delivered with an acute sense of restraint and precision… it's the parts that are left out that carry the greatest weight and here, each piece manages to convey a deep emotional resonance with the merest hint of ethereal melody… could easily stand as one of the condenders for ambient album of the year." - Fluid Radio
"… pastoral swelling and decaying… crackling of tape hiss… spacious and atmospheric… beauty is a rarity sometimes." - Vital Weekly
"A fine album of neo-classical and treated electronics… steeped in elegance and a soothing nostalgia… the music works best as a detached mediation, as a morning or evening suite of sounds and melancholy moods for quiet contemplation." - Mind Bomb
"… one of the few albums to transcend even the best of modern ambient music - Stars of the Lid and William Basinski in mind. We discover music at once familiar and mysterious…" - Autres Directions (translated from French)
" There's a haunting spirituality... and silence is used as a compositional element here to good effect... mournful and reflective... a beautifully restrained little slab of melancholy..." - Norman Records
"Much of Willamette's wistful material unfurls slowly and is, more often than not, drenched in crackle and dust, a move that lends the tracks a time-weathered and nostalgic character... one of the things that makes Echo Park separate itself from the ambient crowd is concision." - Textura
"Stunning." - Noisetopia
"Each track is given time and space to evolve and increase organically, each passage attended to with a degree of carefulness and restraint. Therein lie enchanted sounds of swelling waves at night and pens scribbling romantic love letters… it sure is beautiful." - The Silent Ballet
"… nothing is imposed… there are vibrant atmospheres you need to embrace, adopt and interpret. The changes, the elements, are subtle and understated. It takes time, as a listener, to understand how much the compositional backbone of this record is solid, precise and precious." - Derives Webzine
"A gorgeous set of dust-borne miniatures. Undoubtedly beautiful in its simplicity and timelessness. Recorded straight to ghost-laden magnetic tape and into our memories forever."- Tristian Kelley
"...hooked in by its beauty and... aura..." - Stuart Gould
"…brilliant… harmonious swells and beautiful crackling warmth…" - cloudsinanenvelope
"[Willamette's] music has been a fixture for me the past few months..." - Jad Abumrad (Radiolab)
“… can be considered one of the most gorgeous ambient albums ever recorded…” - Victrola
“Willamette’s prim approach to their albums has been to strip the already constituent emotion to its meagre essentials… [They] went to an extravagant length to capture such an expanse in sound, almost to an extent where Echo Park sounds as amorphous, and as difficult to describe, as the object of its accent.” - The Larchwood
Interview with Fluid Radio
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