“The neo-classical vision is very well integrated with the electronic side of the album...”
1 Changling2 8:03
2 Waves of jain 10:14
3 TiFFaNy SpaRK 4:48
4 Changling1 (Valentine Micheal Smith) 7:24
5 UR Metal 14:45
6 BreathinBeach 16:08
7 Blauer Kern 9:01
8 Changling at TharsisStation 10:34
(DDL 81:52) (V.F.)
(Neo-classical, Avant-gardist EM)
219! I counted more or less 219 albums of E Clark Cornell, the man behind Latome2, registered on his Bandcamp site. That's a lot if you consider that the Philadelphia musician has other projects on the side, including La Ponto Ensemblo which also maintains a not so bad pace in terms of creativity. For this first album on Cyclical Dreams Music, Latome2 proposes a retrospective of his singles made during the last 5 years. THE FUTURE OF DESIRE is only available as a download and offers 80 minutes of ambient music split between the true nature of synthesizers, with a tribal-psybient approach, and the orchestral side that some synthesists like to elaborate. But in the end, it's still an ambient album that has its share of surprises.
Right from the start, Changling2 is a good track built on the droning effects of a synth wave floating gracefully in the boundaries of our imagination. The movement is slow, and its undulations let filaments that surround its derivation with more scarlet musical glows. I like the nuances with bows plowing the cellist's pain and more romantic violin tones. A good meditative moment and possibly the best track on THE FUTURE OF DESIRE. The landscape of Waves of jain is the opposite with an ambient approach fed with organic noises, as iconoclastic. The backbone is in the same mold as the great classics of meditative music with slow flights of a celestial, striving body. It is the interior that differs with a dichotomous vision of the sound effects. It's still quite enjoyable to listen too, unlike the soundscape of TiFFaNy SpaRK, a track composed with Hans-Dieter Schmidt, which is too aggressive for meditative music. This is in the new creative direction of the duo which is quite far from the charms of Eniwetok Suite. Changling1 (Valentine Micheal Smith), brings it all back to a very orchestral level. In an ambient envelope that embraces the serenity of Changling2, the synth waves and coexisting filaments are replaced by orchestral outbursts and the melancholic filaments side is rendered by violins. It's different because it's more powerful as a texture, and it's still beautiful.
Fascinating, UR Metal is a bit like Waves of jain, but the music has no body, but acts like one. Its conception comes from breaths from Tibetan bell tinkling, a bass line and the unknown. These elements, and other disparate tones, form the content of a body without outline that nevertheless travels with these sound elements. The bass line extends whispers, unlike a guitar that crumbles its chords. The content of the sonic journey is like a flock of sheep following a spiritual guide. BreathinBeach follows the same pattern, except that here the musicality is signed by a piano that scatters its notes in a corridor without delimitation. The tinkling bells remain present while the keyboard vibrates its arpeggios with a good cosmographic luminosity. The finale is very abrupt and should have benefited from a better fade out as the metallic winds of Blauer Kern begin with an assault on the ears. Yet this is a track of the same caliber as Changling1 (Valentine Micheal Smith), less musical with orchestrations that are more linear. There is a dark side, intriguing in this title whose atmospheres become cinematographic with a leaning for a movie of anguish. For a good thriller! Changling at TharsisStation ends this meditative album with a more philharmonic vision. Synth layers pile up and drift with violin wings attached in an ambient panorama that indulges in this philharmonic approach of Latome2.
Ambient music has been flooding the E.M. market since its conception, so albums of the kind abound by hundreds of thousands in the E.M. realm. Which is why THE FUTURE OF DESIRE becomes more interesting. The neo-classical vision is very well integrated with the electronic side of the album, bringing an acoustic flavor to the album, while the psybient side of the messy noises is tamable quite easily.
Sylvain Lupari (September 16th, 2021) ***¾**
Available at Cyclical Dreams Bandcamp