“With a title like Bulb, Underlying gets to be the zenith in Kryfels' career”
1 Underlying 5:33 2 Synchronicities 5:02 3 Before the Bulb 6:23 4 Chessions 6:08 5 Connections 6:23 6 Bulb 35:18 Kryfels Music | KR05
(CD 65:02) (V.F.) (Ambient Berlin School)
A rendezvous with the music of Kryfels is a rendezvous with the experimentations, the sound ideas of the vintage years. Experimentations, since Richard Raffaillac likes to weave his own ambiances and sculpt his rhythms in a universe where the colors of the tones are expressed by a panoply of analog synths and sequencers. Soft, floating and dreamy, the music of UNDERLYING breathes through those synth multilayers, sometimes charming sequencing patterns, drifting like ink jets of giant octopus in a blue ocean where live sonic creatures in search of a form to live in it.
The first part is like a kind of sound essays with slow structures evolving in colorful decors. These textures offer cosmic and organic effects, some are even oceanic, in slow exploratory waltzes of a cosmos imagined and explored by this distinct approach of the analog era. One must be very focused to meditate around these structures where the surrounding noises tickle as much as seduce the pores of paint on the walls. The title track begins with an avalanche of synth lines and waves that intersect their visions, both cosmic and oniric, in a hyper-slow waltz where our senses drift on the wings of a music animated by its crossroads of underlying modulations. Synchronicities offers another more cosmic texture with a flurry of electronic chirp effects that mimic a wave as unobtrusive as the whisper of a Mellotron. It sounds like a horde of extraterrestrial sparrows trying to sharpen their song with the serenity of this linear movement. Synth riffs, a bit like the laser of Jean-Michel Jarre, pour a sinister perfume to this bipolar procession, since the horde of birds returns to disrupt the sweet ambiences of Synchronicities around the 3rd minute. You have to listen to the splendid Bulb before understanding Before the Bulb which literally wants to sound like the genesis of the delicious epic title of UNDERLYING. In fact, it's Bulb in a concentrated version! Chessions is a title of linear vibes propelled by the different shades of the synth modulations. Connections concludes this first part of this last Kryfels album with an approach always of meditative music to which elements of another texture are added. A texture that is both organic and oceanic with swirling effects in a structure spiced up by acute songs of a synth in mode cosmic wailing.
From the top of its 35 minutes, Bulb dominates the sound horizons of Kryfels' 5th opus. This monument of electronic meditative music begins with flickering waves that propel themselves to infinity with the help of a dormant line of bass. The mist's banks scatter their effects while the main line of the synth unties another thin more harmonious sound line. This mass forms an ambient procession with buzzing lines, others purring, to agglutinate in a sound node whose core drops these filaments that will surround the slow evolution of a very good segment of meditative music where my senses become heavier. A superb movement of the sequencer sculpts an ambient and thoughtful rhythm, projecting me in the best moments of the floating music of the 70's. These sequences which carve these constantly rising rhythms lead the first part of Bulb towards a phase animated of these electronic percussions that charmed the senses in these rumbas that Jean-Michel Jarre liked to use to complete his first 3 albums. Lively, but still effective in its meditative embryo, Bulb reaches a brief phase where the garish colors of synths embellish the ambiances of a potion against sleep. The upward movement of the sequencer gets backs with a more dominant approach where the synth layers follow in a secondary role. And I'm floating with these ambiences of a music that will end its journey with titanic organ pads and sober percussions that feel lost in this more intense finale. With a title like Bulb, this album gets to be the zenith in Kryfels' career. This is the kind of title that obsesses us with its very lyrical approach and the immersive sweetness of the sequencer. If that was a piece of music signed by Klaus Schulze, most of us would said that it's a genial track. Evidently, Kryfels doesn't have the notoriety of Klaus Schulze, but it doesn't detract of his approach to composition or his music to be simply great in this UNDERLYING where the first titles require a greater mind openness, but not this monument that is Bulb. Sylvain Lupari (September 3rd, 2018) ****½* SynthSequences.com Available PWM Distrib