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Five songs in five minutes
Yellow6 - 5 Yellow6 - 5
MP3 EP 2013 | Silber 147
5 tracks, 5 minutes

The drone guitar work of Yellow6 is joined by piano for the 5 in 5 challenge.

: Press Release
: Digital Booklet

Track Listing:
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
Reviews:
Yellow6 likes wide open spaces. Over the course of five mere minutes they manage to cover a lot of territory showing off the highly versatile label of ‘ambient’. Much of it deals with more rock based atmospheres, though they do delve into classical and most prominently noise. Here on ‘5’ Yellow6 appears to reflect upon what it means to create truly ‘ambient’. By including harsher textures it makes the listener realize the thin line between what is typically classified as ‘ambient’ and what is considered ‘noise’. For due to the extreme brevity of the pieces there is little that could count as a proper melody, only mood comes through.
‘5.1’ introduces the collection with a brief piano piece. On ‘5.2’ the album appears to begin its true focus allowing a guitar twang over more confrontational guitar distortion. Shifting around it becomes quite uncomfortable almost disorientating in nature. Things begin to come together on ‘5.3’ which reflects on the guitar twang alongside the ‘5.1’ piece. Everything changes for the harsh ‘5.4’ which sounds like a spent guitar with the guitar barely scraping by in the distance. ‘5.5’ ends the collection on a dramatic note with the sound soaring high into the sky. Unfortunately ‘5.5’ only has a limited amount of time to explore its texture while the elements from the previous ‘5.4’ keep the rhythm.
Putting the pieces together in a creative fashion ‘5’ succeeds at showing how each aural element can be re-purposed for new things. Overall Yellow6 engage in intriguing sonic introspection.
~ Beach Sloth

Two new releases via the much loved silber imprint finds a welcome return to these pages of Yellow6. Released as part of the silber’s ongoing 5 songs in five minutes series and simply titled ’5’, Yellow6 re-affirms his exquisite deft application for the craft of the touching, the melancholic and the atmospheric. For a musician usually free to express and fill a limitless canvas with cavernous emotional stirring epics, this restrictive time constrained five in 5 work ethic finds Mr Atwood repositioning his usual song craft process to having to hit the ground running. Applied to a sparse water coloured palette this quintet of short interludes manifest fully formed with such melancholic frailty as to leave you trembling, the ice trimmed sepia flow of ‘#1’ is a tenderly turned upon a classically tweaked looping piano motif that calls to Roger Eno in contemplative moods, the hazy side wind that greets the all too brief ’#2’ is old school Y6 of yesteryear, dry, hollowed and enigmatic portraits of dust caked vast lands scorched by blazing skies – reference wise like a compressed godspeed. Introspective poise is the order of the day for the bitter sweetly trimmed ‘#3’while ’#4’ sees him emerge from the shade animated though pensively perched in a fuzz showering stand off as though an updated Morricone spaghetti western styled dual dance leaving all to coalesce resplendently on the blister kissed finale ‘#5’ wherein for a brief moment a cavalcade of shimmer toned arpeggio haloes rupture the stilled skies and bathe the arid dead lands beneath in a deathly foreboding tension.
~ The Sunday Experience

UK project YELLOW6 is the creative vehicle of composer and musician Jon Attwood. Since he started creating material using this moniker in 1998 he has released, contributed to or otherwise participated on close to 100 productions. “Five” was released by US label Silber Records in 2013, and is a contribution to that labels ongoing “5 in 5″ series of EPs.
Unlike many other artists that have contributed to the “5 in 5″ series of five minute long EPs on Silber Records in 2013, Yellow6 creates material of a fairly accessible nature. Dampened, careful music with distinct ambient qualities is the name of the game, sometimes with fairly careful dramatic additions that adds a more distinct nerve. From the opening track’s careful use of piano as both rhythm and resonating tone instrument this EP actually develops too. The second track features a plucked acoustic guitar motif with a swirling, dronelike noise placed on top, and on the third track the acoustic guitar reappears, now combined with the piano utilized as a rhythm effect just like on the opening track. The fourth construction features an acoustic guitar used as a rhythm effect, with a noise-oriented electric guitar drone on top and a subtle percussion effect as a subtle supplemental detail. The concluding fifth creation then combines the acoustic guitar used as a rhythm effect with a light toned, textured electric guitar that delivers a fairly typical post rock motif as the dominant effect.
All five compositions comes across as well planned and executed compositions in their own right, and by utilizing familiar instruments and patterns in the final three tracks this EP gets a neat and distinct identity too. As far as my taste in music is concerned this 5 minute long excursion is one well worth a check if you enjoy instrumental music, especially if you have a taste for ambient and post-rock oriented music.
~ Olav Martin Bjørnsen, House of Prog

The 25th instalment of Silber’s five-songs-in-five-minutes challenge sees Yellow6 – UK guitarist Jon Attwood – add occasional piano to his ambient-tinged guitar arsenal.
Now up to his fiftieth release, Attwood clearly has the skills to create guitar soundscapes that work in the Rothko/Stars of the Lid/Kranky vein. It’s unfortunate this release doesn’t allow them room to unfurl.
Unlike other releases in the series, Yellow6 seems to eschew the idea of unrelated songs and provides five minute-long pieces that seem designed to follow each other in order. Indeed, by 5’s end tracks ‘5.4’ and ‘5.5’ flow straight into one another, their cleanly plucked chords jumping the song gap with ease.
The problem is that his sound seems irreconcilable with the limited time given to the EP.
In ‘5.1’, piano introduces the theme upon which the tracks seem built – a slow, minimal cascade over the top of repeated, static chords. Following tracks develop this slightly. ‘5.2’ sounds like Sling Blade-era Daniel Lanois, while ‘5.3’ brings to mind Charlie Owen’s guitar work on Louis Tillett’s Midnight Rain. ‘5.4’ brings a venomous, plodding chunk to the mix, coupled with a howling noise which manages not to upset the measured, clean chord pluckings that command attention, leading to the EP’s final Godspeed You Black Emperor guitar-neighbourhood track. .
It’s affecting stuff, but all too brief.
By the end of the five tracks, the listener is put in mind less of a musical challenge and more of a sound library demo disc. These snippets are great, but even if taken as one five-minute piece, lack the space they need to really sing. A shame, as what’s here certainly shines.
~ Luke Martin, Cyclic Defrost

Ce n'est pas parce qu'elles ne le méritent pas (loin de là même) qu'on ne parle pas à chaque fois des nouvelles sorties dans la série "5 in 5" chez Silber Records. Mais entre le manque de temps et le fait qu'il n'est pas forcément évident d'évoquer de tels objets soniques (cinq "chansons" en cinq minutes, tel est le concept), il faut bien faire un choix. Mais là, l'occasion était trop belle d'évoquer enfin en ces pages Yellow6 alors...
Jon Attwood (dont Yellow6 est donc le nom-de-plume) est un musicien productif : depuis 15 ans, il a multiplié (allez voir sa discographie pour vous en convaincre)(et allez jeter une oreille sur Bandcamp) les sorties, expérimentant sans cesse aux frontières du drone, du post-rock et du shoegaze. Tout en trouvant le temps de co-diriger l'excellent et regretté label Make Mine Music. Il semblait naturel qu'il s'attaque un jour à un concept comme le "5 in 5". Et qu'il le fasse avec brio.
Cela fait maintenant plus d'une heure que j'écoute Five en boucle, et non seulement je ne m'en lasse pas, mais j'y découvre sans arrêt de nouvelles choses. Et je ne cesse d'être surpris par le fait que chaque titre est parfaitement distinct, avec son propre univers, et se suffit à lui même, malgré sa courte durée, tout en s'imbriquant parfaitement dans l'ensemble pour former un morceau fleuve... de cinq minutes... ou d'une heure (voire beaucoup plus) si vous laissez votre Player en boucle.
Bien entendu, pour créer cette cohésion, Yellow6 joue des répétitions. Mais non seulement il n'en abuse pas et sait les rendre discrètes, mais surtout il multiplie les variations et les ruptures, aussi bien dans qu'entre les morceaux. Ainsi '5:1' ouvre l'EP sur une jolie boucle de piano qui trouvera des échos divers dans les quatre autre titres et qui conclut aussi les dernières secondes de '5:5' bouclant une boucle qui ne demande qu'à être répétée encore et encore. Entre temps, on aura eu droit à des passages de drone aussi bien spatiaux que brutaux. A des envolées lumineuses comme à de douces rêveries sucrées.
Bref, les "5 in 5" s'enrichissent d'un nouveau volume parfaitement réussi qu'on ne peut que vous conseiller de vous procurer au plus vite.
~ Dans Le Mur Du Son

Two new releases via the much loved silber imprint finds a welcome return to these pages of Yellow6. Released as part of the silber’s ongoing 5 songs in five minutes series and simply titled ’5’, yellow6 re-affirms his exquisite deft application for the craft of the touching, the melancholic and the atmospheric. For a musician usually free to express and fill a limitless canvas with cavernous emotional stirring epics, this restrictive time constrained five in 5 work ethic finds Mr Atwood repositioning his usual song craft process to having to hit the ground running. Applied to a sparse water coloured palette this quintet of short interludes manifest fully formed with such melancholic frailty as to leave you trembling, the ice trimmed sepia flow of ‘#1’ is a tenderly turned upon a classically tweaked looping piano motif that calls to Roger Eno in contemplative moods, the hazy side wind that greets the all too brief ’#2’ is old school Y6 of yesteryear, dry, hollowed and enigmatic portraits of dust caked vast lands scorched by blazing skies – reference wise like a compressed godspeed. Introspective poise is the order of the day for the bitter sweetly trimmed ‘#3’while ’#4’ sees him emerge from the shade animated though pensively perched in a fuzz showering stand off as though an updated Morricone spaghetti western styled dual dance leaving all to coalesce resplendently on the blister kissed finale ‘#5’ wherein for a brief moment a cavalcade of shimmer toned arpeggio haloes rupture the stilled skies and bathe the arid dead lands beneath in a deathly foreboding tension.
~ The Sunday Experience