“Ultime Atome offers us a great musical panorama on a subject difficult to put into music but which Alpha Lyra succeeds on its always lyrical touch”
1 Uuu111 5:44 2 Uub112 3:54 3 Uut113 4:48 4 Uuq114 7:58 5 Uup115 4:31 6 Uuh116 12:44 7 Uus117 2:49 8 Uuo118 3:59 9 Uun119 4:36 10 Ultime Atome 9:33 Alpha Lyra Music
(CD/DDL 60:44) (V.F.) (Ambient Music, Pacific School)
An album on atoms! Is it interesting you? With a series of titles bearing different nicknames of atoms in search of life and names, Alpha Lyra concocts an EM which flirts with the different variables of these atoms in an album where ambient music is delicately propelled by a nameless rhythmic life. ULTIME ATOME is a superb continuity to the very good Between Cloud and Sky album with figures of ambient rhythms camouflaged in a swarm of synth pads with contrasting tones and where the translucent side is never too far from the sibylline state. And if my cranial space is not overloaded with painkillers, I'd dare to say that it's a neutron concert dictated by a musician who flirts dangerously with the boundaries of being and non-being.
Cottony mist breezes open the Uuu111 experience. A slight manipulation of the sequencer carves a traveling rhythm whose minimalist approach hosts a concert of translucent synth pads filled by radiations and others filled by heavenly voices. Filaments of an azure blue cover this delicate approach which melts too quickly in the silence. No problem, the beefy Uub112 shows its rhythm all in radiation while jumping of its fragile feet under an avalanche of waterlogged layers. Fire and water are elements which draw contrasts all over ULTIME ATOME, either with heavy oceanic layers or by those voices of fire which furrow the tumultuous elements of the last Alpha Lyra album. After these two animated titles, Uut113 returns to the more ambient signature of Christian Piednoir. If there is a slight pulsating movement, it's buried and ochered by a duality between the ether and the angelic which squabbles this fascinating musical poetry on abstract elements of our daily life. The attention to detail is omnipresent in this album where a real texture of iodine grows up to our ears in each chapter of this album. Uuq114 is a small jewel structured on an approach of a sequencer in mode Steve Roach. And what about the synth layers where spectral voices are lost in a mist? Pure Steve Roach, just like Uuh116 while Uuo118, another track animated of a fascinating tumultuous structure, offers a concerto of pearls which dance with their mirrored reflections in the echoes of multiple effects of reverberations. Uup115 is an ambient title astonishing musical. If one listens attentively, one notices the genesis of a melody quite sublime in its frame of foggy voice. The synth pads are quite striking. Ditto for Uus117 which lays down a seraphic veil to the multiple ambient structures of this album. Uun119 lays cavernous layers which circulate in an endless corridor. Ultime Atome is in the pure Alpha Lyra tradition with an ambient pattern where burst out bubbles carrier of a melody fragmented and scattered and of which the tinklings are floating in a universe filled of misty layers and of sibylline lines. Thus, concluding an album which survives very well to Between Cloud and Sky, even if the subject is devilishly more delicate. A beautiful album that we listen the head going adrift, but not too much because we can miss elements that will come to haunt us over the next listenings.
Sylvain Lupari (July 9th, 2018) ****½*
Available at Alpha Lyra Bandcamp