In autumn of 2001 two males, living almost precisely at the centre of England, decided upon the name aurelie to denote their collaboration. The word itself is a common girl's name on the continent and was chosen purely for its phonetic beauty rather than any inherent meaning. Their first project was a sike - a nine minute video of monochrome stills which juxtaposed the crumbling tenements of a Venetian Jewish ghetto against psychiatric units' sterile corridors and Orwellian seclusion rooms. Its musical accompaniment layered shimmering strings and falsetto choral lines over delay-drenched guitar and distended, crunching rhythms.

The solitary human voice that seemed to reverberate around these marginal places as if in a wordless song of exile, is still present in aurelie's debut album desde que nací. Though still elegiac, their newer work radiates a warmer, hope-tinged glow. As the title of "stateless" would suggest, aurelie's music (like that of their swim colleague Akatombo) resonates with a feel of displacement as if they too were strangers in a strange land, made stranger by it being their place of birth.

However desde que nací is no study in alienation. In songs such as white sun descend and sea / sky / mountain aurelie seem to gaze upon the physical world with a kind of contentment. The hum of technological intervention, though never far off, does little to disrupt the music's organic ambience. Unseen landscapes roll past: sometimes as vast swathes of sound; sometimes as edgy, abrasive promontories. Although resolutely linear in structure, this record plays as a resolved whole - as if composed from varied observations of a single vista. Perhaps desde que nací is an entity in itself, discrete and enclosed. Or perhaps it is an horizontal sweep across terrain that aurelie are yet to explore. Either way this contemplative sonic work invites listening.

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"Quiet intropection has rarely been so panoramic or expansive", "the overall feeling is one of electronic ambience rediscovered & rendered new", "this is Krautrock as you remember it, not how it was" - Ken Hollings The Wire

"Quality ambient music" - David Stubbs Uncut

"fuzzy, melancholy, spacious, warm" - Duncan Bell Muzik

"music beyond genre boundaries, from a time that wasn't a time" - Graeme Rowland Brainwashed