“Immersive like the Immersion series, Disorientation Flow is the best way to plunge in your need of quietness”
1 The Imperative Edge 13:40 2 Metamorphosis 12:52 3 Disorientation Flow 15:47 4 Blistering 9:02 5 The Lament Broke 13:30 Projekt Records | PRO0316 (CD/DDL 64:51) (V.F.) (Ambient Drone)
With the years, and especially with the kind collaboration of Projekt Records and of Spotted Peccary, I became clearly more open to the form of ambient music. I have learnt when to listen to it and how to hear it in order to finally enjoyed it, especially when the sleep taunts my tiredness. I so discovered a universe of perceptions where every detail enriched the peace of mind with slow movements which tuck the silence with such a sensibility that we eventually end to get lost in time. And it's very exactly what happens with DISORIENTATION FLOW, a second opus about the forms of silence and meditation that Dirk Serries proposes via the American label. Dirk Serries is not a newcomer! It's a musical project which is in parallel to the career of Vidna Obmana, the famous Belgian composer of ambient music who is as much prolific than Steve Roach. And it's not a coincidence if both seem capable of creating symphonies out from the solitudes of winds. I had precisely heard the music of Dirk Serries for the first time with his collaboration album Low Volume Music that he made with Steve Roach back in 2012. The fusion between the guitar tears and the morphic, the enveloping and the rather vampiric synth waves had fairly seduced me. DISORIENTATION FLOW is built upon those same ambient mirages. A little less dark and less amorphous than Steve Roach's Immersion series, it's nevertheless a deep ambient work, an almost silent one, where every piece of sound is brood by a surprising sonic presence. Totally improvised and recorded in real time, DISORIENTATION FLOW is presented in 5 long morphic chapters where Vidna Obmana establishes a kind of meditative communion between a solitary author and his numerous fans who only dream about a solitude shared with the company of others.
Purple shadows, where the imagination dreams about groans of guitar which flatter the morphic delicacy of the synth lines of which the slow flights are haloed by the singings of astral nymphs, squeak over the brief serenity in the opening of The Imperative Edge. The tones are lively and are sparkling. They shine of an aura dirtied by the deep scarlet moods of an introduction where the peace of mind bickers with the iridescence of a huge sound magma which threatens every second of pierce the walls of oblivion. A bassline a bit idle spreads slow eddies of which the larva draws the delicate movements of a passion full of restraint. Between the peace and the passive agitation, the ambiences raise themselves in an opaque monument which little by little unfolds a crescendo of emotionalism where the colors, rather lively at times, of the sounds tame the quiescence of a silence torn by an avalanche of strata in tints as rich as their forms. Metamorphosis gets loose from this purple envelope with a thick cloud of drones, of hoarse breezes which pierce the remaining shadows of The Imperative Edge. The communion is intense because the shadows float like tears in suspension while Dirk Serries multiplies the effects of reverberations, forging a compact mass of ambient sounds which shows all of its sibylline nuances. This mixture of guitar tears, of synth sighs and of half-silent voices is the backdrop of an intensely meditative work where Dirk Serries takes good care to play with his shades. There are small pebbles of Structures from Silence which float throughout this ode to a darker but also more harmonious silence. And it's even more convincing with the title-track which is the most seraphic piece of music here. Blistering brings us to another level of contemplativity with a very dark introduction. Little by little the colors of the silence, these sobs in the tears of a very intrusive six-strings, come to haunt the darkness of Blistering which renews with the passive spectral melodies of DISORIENTATION FLOW. We reach a point where the time loses its dens and where our spirit confuses the silence and the sounds when The Lament Broke spreads a nice thin line of musicality, always very astral, on the silence of the shadows which little by little has tamed this soft rebellion against the calming of our inner senses.
Sylvain Lupari (August 2nd, 2015) ***½**
Available at Projekt Records Bandcamp