“With its ambient rhytms and its astral melodies, Plenitude turns out to be a very nice meditative and ambient album”
1 Prelude 4:46
2 Action 10:54
3 Temple 11:27
4 Devi 10:51
5 Plenitude 9:21
6 On the Beach (Bonus) 15:25
(CD-R/DDL 62:44) (V.F.)
(Ambient minimalist astral EM)
With the release of Thunderbolt-Live at the Black Sea, Indra announced his come back on the EM scene for 2014. But few of us know that this surprising artist inspired by the minimalist movements of Klaus Schulze, as much vintages as contemporaries, possesses an impressive discography. Only in the 90's, the Rumanian synthesist has made our ears enchanting with an impressive total of 21 albums or K7. Several of them are now out of print and have been rereleased in the size of CD or made available via downloadable platforms. PLENITUDE is one of them. It's an album closer to contemplative ambiences with floating rhythms where Indra is massaging his keyboards and synths keys in order to mold an astral choir which hums in some captivating and slow cosmic waves.
With its chords which fall and flee time such as a woodpecker mislaid in the mechanism of a metronome on acid, Prelude gets ready to weave the cocoon for a beautiful ear worm. The flow is strangely mesmerizing, even if devoid of concrete rhythm, with fine modulations in its progression. Chords of sitar are tinkling behind this hypnotic tick-tock which quietly becomes soaked by an iridescent mist and by iodized choirs while that percussions fall a little before the second minute, solidifying thus the Teutonic harmonious impact of this innocent ritornello. The astral choirs are the heart of the meditative ambiences of this album. They are very dense at the opening of Action and melt into the floating Mellotron's harmonies and its orchestral airs before infiltrating the beatings of the muffled pulsations which forge a linear and ambient rhythm. Chords stemming from a fusion between a piano and an acoustic guitar weave the main lines of an evasive melody which gets lost in an intense sonic morphic setting. Temple is a long contemplative movement where stroll fine modulations among chords which tinkle into iridescent breezes blown by ethereal voices. It's a good moment of ambiences, just like the title-track which is more orchestral on the other hand thus more moving, where the combination of synth and mellotron plays a dominating role by multiplying amphibian waves which modulate a psychedelicosmic and surrealist approach, like in the first works of Tangerine Dream (Zeit and Atem). After a very ambiospherical intro flooded by cosmic sea waves and by some ochred breezes which blow lengthily into the astral ways and into timeless waltzes, Devil offers a rhythm as so ambient as Action with static percussions which forge a passive measure among a powerful morphic mosaic. It's very intense but not as On the Beach. Even if writes 15 years after the making of the album, this long bonus track offered with this new edition respects its ambient rhythms and its meditative ambiences with a pattern of delicate percussions of which the rollings rumble in the furrows of a sequencing structure where the keys are rolling and dancing as wavelets on a brook sometimes quiet and sometimes agitated. It's very introspective, just like the whole of PLENITUDE which turns out to be another nice meditative and ambient work from Indra.
Sylvain Lupari (January 11th, 2014) ***½**
Available at Indra's Bandcamp