“Cold Gate offers rhythms à la Software carrying soft melodies, a bit neurasthenic, moulded in Johannes Schmoelling's imprints”
1 A Day with Rain 5:21
2 Mothership Landing 7:46
3 Cold Gate 5:43
4 Darwin Array 6:45
5 Loneliness Earth 4:58
6 Order and Disorder 10:42
7 After Hibernation 5:36
8 Arctic Storm 4:29
9 Winners and Losers 4:47
10 Eternal Darkness 6:14
11 Pulsating Moments 5:38
(DDL 67:59) (V.F.)
(New Berlin School)
If you are a fan of EM of the New Berlin School style and if you still don't know Alluste, you definitively miss something. Hardly 5 months after having delivered his great Euphemisms&Aphorisms, Alluste returns with a more melancholic album. Weaved in an enchanted and a fragile universe of ice, COLD GATE offers rhythms tinted of a harmonious parallelism where fragile sound arcs and morphic spirals à la Software are carrying soft melodies, a bit neurasthenic, moulded in Johannes Schmoelling's imprints. It's another beautiful album for this new Banfi who is more logical on the other hand than the precursor of the Italian EM.
A Day with Rain opens this Piero Monachello's 6th opus with a frosty wind which drops fine melancholic crystal keys. Gloomy arpeggios flowing along the trails of the North winds which weave a sad melody to be made Suzanne Ciani blushing. Sequences activate themselves, sowing the doubt in the listener mind who will constantly be trapped between melodies with a saddened aroma and the light rhythms which are in contrarieties in this harmonic balance. They flutter in the breezes of voices, waiting for the soft train of the silky pulsations which modulate a rhythm as delicate as the tones of blue glass which feed the tones and ringings of sequences. A Day with Rain is very representative of what is going to follow because the universe of this album is forged of these fine melodies which let glide, spin and clink dreamy arpeggios from which the jitters and furtive jumps are resounding in mists of ether. Take Mothership Landing. After a rather cosmic intro, sequences swirl in a soft spiral. They spin around under the jingles of cymbals, flying towards a bidirectional rhythm from where pops another line of sequences with movements more quavering. These harmonious contrarieties, which are synonymic of hearing curiosities, abound on COLD GATE. We have to think of Loneliness Earth, which reminds me enormously the universe of Yanni and the somber Winners and Losers as well as the splendid Eternal Darkness with its sequences which flutter as fireflies, of which the crisscrossed and unfinished flights dance under some dense organic strata. The intro, which hides a structure off the wall, takes its flight towards a surprising melodic approach frozen in a whirlwind of ice where the rhythm gallops slowly on the ice floes of infinity. The title-track proposes a slow rhythmic evolution where ghostly streaks tear up an ambience fed by astral voices. The rhythm is forged by small kicks which skip and accelerate finely the pace in an ambience tetanised by ochred sails and dusts of stars.
Darwin Array, quite as Pulsating Moments, offers a morphic rhythmic structure with strings of sequences with unpredictable rotatory movements. And quietly we move forward in the cosmic phase of COLD GATE with Order and Disorder and After Hibernation which use fragrances of intergalactic elements à la Jean-Michel Jarre. Wooden bells resound in void, entailing in their echoes the genesis of a rhythm which moves forward stealthily. The rhythm is deploying in finesse with a meshing of these bells, the furtive pulsations and the fragile sequences which ring in an attractive melodic cacophony. The synth loosens clouds of ghostly tones which roam on a structure in continual movement. And without ever overflowing his soft morphic setting, Alluste insufflates to Order and Disorder another spiraled rhythm which encircles solitary arpeggios and harmonious fragments wandering on a structure more ambient than rhythmic, but rich in heterogeneous tones faithful to the electronic harmonisations of the vintage years. There is a lot of research on this track which is, and by far, the best on this album and possibly of Piero Monachello's career. And we feel in it a clear influence of Tangerine Dream of Le Parc and Legend era. Softer and more seraphic, After Hibernation presents a more fluid rhythm which jumps up with a restraint fury in a meshing of percussions/pulsations to analog tones. And we move forward to the boiling Arctic Storm, a title which reminds me of Clara Moondshine's stubborn rhythms with its sequences of glass which ring in fine harmonious kicks. Supported by the jingles of flickering percussions, these sequences are running at high speed towards a rhythm pure. A rhythm arched on pulsations and muffled percussions which roll through the wintry mists and under the melodious breezes of a synth which reminds us the magic of Johannes Schmoelling's contribution to the works of Tangerine Dream . It's particularly good and this track adds to a list of fascinating tracks of which the rhythmic approaches swim in full contradiction, explaining why this last opus of Alluste is also solid as Euphemisms&Aphorisms which is one of the beautiful surprises of 2012. Seriously, if you don't know Alluste yet, it's high time to put you to it.
Sylvain Lupari (November 13th, 2012) *****
Available at Alluste Bandcamp