“Soft, tender and oneiric this is a cosmic journey in the depths of its own introspection”
1 Open Flux 5:12
2 Perception 5:55
3 Aeternus 4:48
4 Empty Memory 6:02
5 Downfall 5:36
6 Echoes from the Dryland 4:36
7 Fractal Dimension 5:42
8 Age of Irreality 5:16
9 Aureal 5:42
10 Aureal II 5:18
11 Aureal III 7:12
12 Aureal IV 5:12
13 Aureal V 4:10
(DDL 70:42) (V.F.)
(Ambient, Berlin School)
Continuing on the road cleared out of rhythms and sequences started on Behind the Shadows, Javi Canovas offers to his fans another album of pure ambient EM. AUREAL flows with a soft astral limpidity on 13 tracks where he brings the listener to the borders of a shady cosmos where slow sounds irruptions are going along Berber poetic odes and waves of morphic synth.
Open Flux opens this album of cerebral serenity with a soft synth wave which glides of a linear movement where fine impulses draw a celestial harmony. Shaped in hybrid sonorities, synth strata are entwining in a slow conceptual journey like in the title-track which floats rolled up of smooth twangy waves in an elongate sinuous movement. Perception offers an intro closer to Tangerine Dream's Stratosfear years with guitar roam in this multiplicity of morphic layers. Some nice sleepy synth impulses filled with padded waves recover the chords of guitars lost in a cosmic desert where we can hear, if the imagination lends itself to it, light breezes of harmonica. Cosmic and soft, Perception is the ideal solitude journeyman to contemplate stars. Threatening synth breezes plunge Aeternus' intro into a universe tinted with mysticism both spectral and intersidereal. Synth layers are floating and entwining in a slow cosmic ballet quite like in Empty Memory and its skinny and floating synth lines. Downfall presents some good and slow movements of synth tinted with a nice poetic astral approach. It's a nice track à la Steve Roach quite as the moving Fractal Dimension and Aureal II with its tribal fragrances so unique to the American synth player during his Australian journeys. Echoes from the Dryland is a soft and an odd cosmic Berber ode with a synth filled of puny breezes which sing under delicate layers to captivating reverberations. This is a suave and poetic track with a cosmic tribal mood quite as the surprising Age of Irreality. Limpid Aureal III floats around its cosmic waves and a quixotic harp which unwinds its notes in a slow spiral. After the oblong atone light wind of Aureal IV, Aureal V concludes this ambient album with a track full of emotionalism where soft synth layers are coiling up in a good harmonic-cosmic fusion. It's soft, tender and oneiric, quite as the morphic entity that is AUREAL, a cosmic journey in the depths of its own introspection.
Sylvain Lupari (09/04/11) ***½**
Available at Javi Canovas Bandcamp