“Lifecycle sounds like a missing link between the first years of Klaus Schulze and those of Ramp and/or Mr Parsick”
1 Anteroom 5:06 2 The Choice 6:17 3 Open the Door 3:45 4 Life Edge 6:32 5 Mind Transit 4:32 6 Lifecycle 6:14 7 Burned Lands 8:34 8 Alone Again 7:39 9 Anteroom 2 (Parallel World) 6:05 Kryfels Music
(CD 55:07) (V.F.) (Dark ambient music)
I always attack an album of ambient music with a lot of detachment. I put myself the nose in a book and I let myself absorb by this sonic void which invades my senses, such these big waves of ink coming from a huge octopus. If the reading takes place without my ears rise up, I know that the music is soft, quiet and linear... It's when my eyes get loose from words of a writer (I read now Faims from Patrick Sénécal) to connect in my ears that my senses have detected something impressive. A little like here with Life Edge. LIFECYCLE is the 3rd album from the French synth wizard Kryfels. A quieter album, and especially darker, than Parsec where revealed us to be another follower of the primary years Klaus Schulze. And if the influence of Schulze always remains so present in the movements of ambiences of Kryfels, his music here inhales another perfume. That of occultism with strange sound shadows which eventually steal our eyes of the nothingness to fix them where Kryfels wants to bring us.
An austere shade rises of our loudspeakers. Spreading a sinister wave, it divides into many lines of which the sibylline colors also reveal abstruse chants. Multiplying the layers of dark ambiences, Anteroom invades our senses with perfumes of ether and invites us to the 9 sound chapters of LIFECYCLE with a very ambient and dark approach where chthonian murmurs and hollow winds harmonize their hold on our sense of hearing. The movements get organized around the last album of Kryfels with the slow arches, always very Mephistophelian, of The Choice and its sepulchral waves moved by layers of organ and beatings of steel doors. That makes very vintage ambient. Open the Door is dragged a little in these dead movements but with a halo of luminosity which irradiates such as voices of spectres buried in slow and sinuous oscillations of a vampiric bass line which will mislay a beautiful spectral melody towards the finale. We are always in the dark corridors of the fissures, even if the power of tones and the muffled movements of rhythm liven up little by little the moods here. Life Edge leads the charge with a storm of woosh which sweeps the sonic horizons. A delicate movement of sequences makes twinkle its keys which dance in a figure of rhythm more harmonious than rhythmic. Bright veils caress this chant of sequences livened by some beautiful astral embraces whereas Life Edge swirls as a xylophone in the form of a carousel. The sounds get more acute and the shadows more scarlet, while are grafted large groans of a chloroformed layer which little by little switches off the magic of the twinkling carillons of Life Edge.
Mind Transit proposes an ambient rhythm knotted around staccato effects from which the echoes swirl slightly on the sonic carpet of synth waves with very analog tones. One would say vapors of old Schulzian organ. The title-track is a real tribute to these ambient rhythms of the nice time of Klaus Schulze. Even if Richard Raffaillac tries to get rid of the influences of the German master, we cannot avoid the parallels, especially with Lifecycle and its somber rhythm which rises and falls, pursued by vapors of ether and of old organ. That's very beautiful and that brings us to the period of Timewind. The same goes for the very ambient Burned Lands which brings us near the nebulosity with a thick cloud of spectral waves which float in a mass of harmonies of robots-monks humming into deep gutters of which the narrow and willowy corridors seem to connect with cosmos. The touching layers which decorate the finale give shivers to the soul. There are dusts of rhythm of Life Edge in Alone Again. Less circular, the structure is parading in fine limpid jerks and is eaten away from everywhere by the powerful woosh, by greedy hollow winds and by shouts of starving spectres. These ambiences are hot, like a storm of cracklings which attack the tolerance of the sense of hearing to analyze the abrasivity of tones. Gradually the calm settles down with soothing layers haloed by an aura of old organ. It's a sonic cataclysm avoided! Anteroom 2 (Parallel World) brings us in the somber corridors of dark ambient music worthy of the universe of Baki Sirros, the soul behind Parallel World, where Kryfels attaches finely these missing links between the first years of Klaus Schulze and those of the last years when the dark ambient music spatters as in the most beautiful moments of Ramp and/or Stephen Parsick.
Sylvain Lupari (June 27th, 2016) *****
Available at PWM Distrib
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