“With its subtle variations of a same melodic pattern on multiples rhythmic forms, it remains a soft and poetic album which hooks our senses”
1 Inception 6:39
2 Blue Rondo 7:01
3 Color of Mind 5:01
4 Visions 6:11
5 Pathfinder 7:29
6 Spirit of the Place 5:15
7 Along the Journey 6:39
8 Timescape 4:54
9 Ocean 5:20
(CD/DDL 54:34) (V.F.)
(Ambient and melodic tribal EM)
Layers of synth make the chimes tinkling and whose tinkles disperse in the songs of opaque winds. Inception reveals its sad melodic envelope with fine chords of acoustic guitars that scratch a skin of sorrow crying in the notes of a meditative piano. These notes fall like tears on the tiling of melancholy, flooding our senses with a ghostly melody whose blue breaths cry like metallic tears that the six-string tortures of its plaintive solos. Ambient, the rhythm succumbs to the theatrical dramatic approach of its designer in order to marry a lunar down-tempo where the tears of the guitar tread on the tears of a piano as lonely as his pain. Ah ... Erik Wollo's music! His melodies float like specters whose translucent euphonies wander in timeless tunnels where layers of synths and tears of guitars merge into evasive sonic mosaics. Taking the romantic and melancholy sweets of his superb and somber Airborne, Erik Wollo returns to haunt our senses, and our ears, with TIMELINES and its 9 tracks whose tender melodic patterns intersect and kiss with fine variations in their approaches on sometimes ambient, tribal and lunar rhythms.
On a phantom rhythm, where the percussions click like the beating of a clock attacked by a convoluted flow, Blue Rondo drinks the harmonic and dramatic model of Inception. It's crazy how everything can look alike and seem so distinctly different in the world of Wollo! Take Color of Mind and Timescape. Even if the rhythmic envelopes are wildly opposite, the melancholic fusion of the guitar and the piano forges the same melodic bases as those found on Inception and Blue Rondo. But let's immediately stipulate that Timescape is a splendid morphic sweetness, even if the nebulous Ocean brings us a thousand places from us. Visions stands out by its approach closer to the ballad with a solitary rhythm which makes your hand tap on your thigh as you contemplate the wind whistling far in a sky adorned with timid sonic auroras. The piano always leaves its imprint of melancholy on a melody always so dark, while the rhythm transpires from its uncertainty between its frenzy repressed by tenderness and its desire to blend with the lunar decor. This piano haunts all TIMELINES' structures. Whether with the delicate tribal and spectral approaches of Spirit of the Place and Along the Journey, it awaits the sound horizon drawn by synth layers and ghostly guitar solos and plunges into our emotions like delicately structured tears in nostalgia. Pathfinder stands apart in this herd of nomadic dreamers with a much sharper pace. On this track, Erik Wollo is visibly inspired by the tribal works of Steve Roach with a structure of rhythm more neurotic than calm where hover and groan tears and layers of this exquisite union between synths and six-strings. It's very good, just like the TIMELINES set which, if it offers fine variations on the same theme, or more or less, has this little something that hooks on each title. And that's the charm of the whole Erik Wollo universe.
Sylvain Lupari (February 15th, 2014) *****
Available at Projekt Records Bandcamp