“AS creates here a discordant sound universe where the ambient meets unstable soundscapes”
1 Doom Bar 48:08
2 Voter Run 14:56
(CD/DDL 63:04) (V.F.)
(Ambient, abstract music)
Available only in format DOOM BAR marks a new musical orientation for the band. The English trio has always favored an approach of improvised music, either in concert or in studio, now he is rather applied to create a discordant sound universe where the ambient meets unstable sound atmospheres. The result is not banal, although closer to anti-musical than melodious structures. DOOM BAR is a daring musical journey in the core of a sonic schizophrenic delirium that swallows all the senses and goes in all senses.
Well installed on two almost identical tracks, Doom Bar opens the sonorities with an amphibious approach full of disturbing reverberations. Piano chords circulate in this unstable sphere, coupling sweet bits with metallic sound interludes that keep their tunes of copper in smacking that can't be distinguished as from a human, extraterrestrial or simply non-existent world. It's in a darkness to get scared of, worthy of a lunar station where thousands of beetles teem in weightlessness, that the movement makes waltz its instability. Unclear voices, whispers, eclectic sounds make this 11th opus of AirSculpture a strange schizophrenic ode to claustrophobic madness. Among this astral cacophony lie beautiful impulses of mellotron waddling on hypnotic tom-toms but wrapped of a siren that coos in a heavy and threatening ambience. An ambience of condemned seized on all sides by sound oddities sometimes clement, sometimes untimely. Much more an exercise of musical style to a complex sound than any other genre, Doom Bar is distinguished by the complexity of its evolution. Absolutely nothing is predictable. Thus, the listener is immersed in an ambient universe where caustic madness is palpable at each sound nook, with its guttural sounds, its synths with heavy aggressive vapors and percussion on anvil that beat a provocative and insane excess, preventing the rest of the soul with a variegated industrial torture. Far from being totally iconoclastic, this repentant madness contains a strange sweetness that sleeps in the background, behind this ambient sound violence. It's like a horror film that devours its prey, in this case us, and that likes to listen itself and feels our dismay as the 63 minutes flee the dial. This is not for all ears and it may also score more than one. To flee if one looks for a harmonic or rhythmic cohesion, or if schizophrenia awaits you. On the other hand, if the anti-music, the abstract art interests you, it's got to be o listen in high definition not to miss anything ...
Sylvain Lupari (May 9th, 2009) **½***
Available on AirSculpture Bandcamp