“This is Dark Ambient with a little something more pleasant to discover”
1 Opening Light 6:54
2 A Light that Fades Away 11:46
3 Through the Mist 4:58
4 Slow Navigation 6:39
5 Searching for Home 6:45
6 Caught in the Dream 9:22
7 Closing Light 4:42
(DDL 51:07) (V.F.)
(Dark Ambient)
After a solid Berlin School album, Electron Hell in early 21, DASK is back in a dark ambient music style that follows the evolution of Winter Stone, also released in early 21. WE ARE THE LOWER LIGHTS is mainly directed to the aficionados of a dark music without rhythmic life, or hardly, which buzzes with its reverberations with drone effects vibrating of its multiple refractions.
It's with a buzzing breath that Opening Light rises to our ears. Like a big grey cloud, the sound mass moves with rays of voices, and/or absent whispers and rustles, like in the slow movement of a celestial body. Our ears attend this subtle fight where the luminescence reverses the nebulous appearance of the title during a misty passage, around the 4th minute. From then on, Opening Light flees with its new seraphic identity. We find the same phenomenon with the very quiet Slow Navigation, whereas the passage of Caught in the Dream is rather in the opposite direction. The same goes for Closing Light. A Light that Fades Away takes a good 40 seconds before moving with slow elegiac layers that float like big heavenly birds in an almost pastoral structure. The slow flights of these layers are like hummed odes that meet more jerky waves, caressing the ideology of a rhythm that was born by mistake and that wants to get back to its embryonic state. The last third of this track is intense and effective. It's undoubtedly the biggest track on WE ARE THE LOWER LIGHTS, though Searching for Home... In an opening filled with blown out layers like tears, Through the Mist moves towards thin pulses to lighten its passage to a territory where death breaths become cavernous breezes. Inspired by sparse sparrow tweets, Searching for Home sculpts a dark and furtive procession through a long, slender breath permanently suspended in the air. It's like being in the woods watching a little girl dressed in red looking for her grandmother's home. The procession follows the course of various instrumentations and their tonalities in its chords that mimic this macabre vision of a wolf watching this little girl. Delicious!
Walking in the footsteps of Winter Stone, but with a little more vitality in the inspiration, this WE ARE THE LOWER LIGHTS from DASK also proposes a beautiful rhythmic vision, as well as harmonic, which gives a second breath to our imagination. It remains in the domain of Dark Ambient with a little something more pleasant to discover.
Sylvain Lupari (January 27th, 2022) ***¾**
Available at DASK Bandcamp