“You won't hear Schulze but you must take the time to listen if you want to hear the links”
1 Fading Out of Sight 57:14
(DDL 57:14) (V.F.)
(Ambient)
The death of Klaus Schulze has prompted many artists working in the electronic music (EM) scene to produce a homage. Although curious, I'm not too fond of the genre. Unless it's exceptional, like the last Spyra, or it's purely a work that widens the spectrum of the German master's influences. This is exactly what FADING OUT OF SIGHT represents for Christian Fiesel who offers here an audacious opus of a fascinating depth that you must take the time to listen if you want to go aboard. You won't hear Schulze on it, that's not the point of this album, but its influence on the evolution of an artist who makes no compromise versus the love of his art. Like Klaus and even Edgar Froese! Two artists who have strongly influenced the musical journey of the one I discovered with the sublime Hagen's Delight in 2017.
It's with the sound of a dead telephone line that begins this personal 57 minutes homily of the German musician. This tone of communication to nothingness metamorphoses into a nest of drones where iridescent synth lines couple with flickering shadows in a setting that gradually fills with howling winds moving like buzzing snakes, not to mention the layers of chthonian voices. And when the vampiric shadows of the synth take on brassy tones, noises and hisses add an obituary touch to the bell-like tinkling from nowhere. This is how the first 11 minutes of Fading Out of Sight unfolds. And when the line, always inoperative, of the telephone buckles the loop, the first rhythmic skeleton of title begins its hypnotic power. The movement is subtle, and it is with difficulty that we notice that it arches on a fine staccato movement of a cello in an ascending vision that moves on stealthily. A gothic haze fills the ambience, as do muffled gongs and strange tones borrowed from the repertoire of cell phone sounds. Like the first 11 minutes, the ambient rhythmic structure is filled with a vastness of tones that sometimes seem to have no connection to the music. The cello step fades under a mass of steel blue that moves like a harmonically strident cloud over the 20th minute of Fading Out of Sight. We're in a meditative phase with this layer of fluty tones that melts into a deaf hum only to return a few minutes later, pushing the mass of reverberations toward a sonic texture closer to Klaus Schulze's early albums. It's here, around the 31st minute, that the influences of Cyborg and especially Irrlicht float happily under a delicious harmonic texture that breathes Tangerine Dream's, in a more blurred vision. The winds become more dominant with a strong azure texture at the 40 minute mark. I'm a big Mike Oldfield fan! What's the connection? Well, the minutes that follow this outpouring of synthesized waves remind me a lot of the second part of Tubular Bells, just before the crazy version of Sailor's Hornpipe. We are in a meditative phase which is covered with a veil of a strident melody to give shivers to a rock. Its last rays disappear in a phase that explains my love for EM. 4 to 5 seconds before the 45th minute, muffled murmurs, similar to grumblings coming from a hungry belly, appear. Under a gust of wind filled with iconoclastic voices, they mumble and graft themselves to a good movement of a vicious bass line that rises and falls in this second and last rhythm structure of FADING OUT OF SIGHT. Creativity! Colorful tinkling and coils falling from a sonic sky divided between its shadow and its light iridescent ray structure an atypical melodic vision that insidiously makes its way to the portal of our emotions. The beats of the bass stumble towards the 50th minute, accentuating this rhythm shaking like a throat rhythm under the metallic reflections of the synth waves to die out in the winds of the abysses where rest undoubtedly several artistic influences of the last centuries.
FADING OUT OF SIGHT is a download album by Christian Fiesel that you have to take the time to listen to from one end to the other in order to grasp those details that explain the meaning of his tribute. The more you listen, the more you make the connections. And the more we find it beautiful.
Sylvain Lupari (June 28th, 2022) *****
Available at Aura Films Bandcamp
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