“In short, a Cold with more warmth and relief”
1 News of the World 5:20
2 Nostalgy 4:49
3 Dancing Snowflakes 5:05
4 Autumn 6:15
5 Labyrinth 8:38
6 Tycho.B 9:27
7 Old Ship 4:01
8 Memories 5:05
9 Lonelyness 4:34
10 North 7:12
11 News of the World. II 5:30
12 Mirror 4:30
(CD 70:22) (V.F.)
(Abstract, ambient, IDM)
After such a syncretic, abstract and atonal album like Cold, one could wonder what Tadeusz Luczejko could have in store for us. MEMORIES is the 8th album of Aquavoice and the second one on Generator.pl. And it's nothing less than an extension of Cold! An album where the multiplicity of sound collages abounds in a heterogeneous musical fauna where the static and the abstract are in constant duality with tender harmonies, rhythms in the style of Portishead and Spyra on ambient passages which do not envy anything to the universes of Brian Eno and the more electro-acoustic one of Plastikman.
Noises of grating static overlap a reverberating loop in the opening of News of the World. Muffled clattering percussion sounds the charge over a pulsating bass line, forming a soft techno beat that becomes a good minimalist rhythm surrounded by strange dialects of animal fauna, once discovered by Johannes Schmoelling on Wuivend Riet, and a mixture of exotic dialects. News of the World opens with a bang and will be the only track to offer a good rhythmic consistency. North and News of the World II offer structures with a soft rhythmic performance, but they are more muffled, and the rhythm develops gradually, after soft hazy passages. Nostalgy, Old Ship, Lonelyness and Mirror are familiar journeys where Cold's abstract world merges with disparate sonic elements in a vase of ether. If you liked this 7th Aquavoice album, you would love it! Dancing Snowflakes offers a little-known variation, much like the title-track, with a light groovy rhythm'bass over a cadence that embraces the effluvia of jazz lost in its own spheres. A track very close to Spyra's world. With its thunders and its showers, Autumn, just like Labyrinth, brings a very melancholic, even morose touch to a sound universe always dressed in its tonalities as varied as the times visited by a swarm of artists with audacious sound collages. After a heavy atonal intro where voices of a parallelism world rubs shoulders with the quirky sonorities of a syncretic universe, Tycho B. adopts a soft hypnotic dangling with light pulsations drowned in twisted resonances and a synth with enchanting solos. A track that subdivides its structure to embrace a tender and moving finale. One of the good tracks on MEMORIES.
After a very introverted Cold, where rhythms were scarcer than oxygen on the Moon, MEMORIES develops a soft rhythmic envelope with a multitude of nuances and emotions. Soft, the rhythms are evolving and hesitate between two universes with cadenced paradoxes while being submerged of a cloud of sound effects at the same time innovative and standardized by bands such as Portishead, Death in Vegas and Chemical Brothers (especially at the level of the hisss of old 33 rpm). In short, a Cold with more warmth and relief from Aquavoice!
Sylvain Lupari (August 30th, 2010) ***½**
Available at Generator.pl