“This is an album of a heavy Dark Ambient style that could scare any claustrophobic in you”
1 Shadowy Periphery 7:43
2 Deepest Reaches 20:06
3 Funeral Cavern 32:05
Musica Maxima Magnetica EEE48
(CD 59:54) (V.F.)
(Dark ambient, Gothic)
Obviously, my musical tastes have evolved since I began listening EM. At first, I simply used to love the genre that had a very melodic vision. Haunting melodic vision! Like those we find in the early Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Then, I discovered the sequencer-based style music. I developed this taste of hearing those sequences, rhythms, and crazy synthesised impetus on complex and twisted structures. And over the years, and with the discovery of dark and ambient artists such as ['ramp] and Steve Roach, I ended up enjoying this musical genre a little bit difficult to tame. I recently listened and reviewed Memory Geist's Benthos and I noticed that my review about FUNERAL CAVERN was very thin and not detailed. Thus, here is an improved version, further to my progress in this musical genre. Is it possible to create heavy ambient? An ambient music that goes out of the depths of a cave filled of giant stigmas. Stigmas from which the corrosive reverberations are smothering beneath a thick cloud of bat to floating spheres of influence, even graceful as the wings of a goose? That's the kind of soundscapes the new synth duet Memory Geist presents us. It's back in 2006 that Bakis Sirros (Parallel Worlds) and Steve Law (Zen Paradox and Solitary Sound) form Memory Geist. A duet which specializes in music of atmosphere with dark and smooth layers of analog synths which floats in an oxidized ambiances.
Shadowy Periphery is dragging us in hollow atmospheres, like if we fell in a bottomless pit. A descent where the dark breezes whistle in our ears at an ambient speed, like if our fall was going in slow motion. We fell, among these heavy expirations coming from the cave's walls, tinkling which ring in this slow downward whirlwind. Bells that are grouping together and sound a devilish Angelus in the entrails of a never ending hole which leads us to the corridors of Deepest Reaches. This is a long track in the sombre wanderings of diurnal winds that is adorned with some solitary chords of which resonances are getting astray in the curves of oscillations and thundering reverberations. Moved by the strength of its gloomy breezes, Deepest Reaches frees some filters of lightness which are immediately caught by the sinuosity of the slow atonal movements. The title-track offers an intro where bells resound in heavy sinuous corridors which are sprinkled of ambient winds and dark ambiances progressing as the migration of slain winds. Funeral Cavern is a mix of the sanctified ambiances of Shadowy Periphery and the immense tenebrous immersion of Deepest Reaches, but with guttural ambiances where superb strata, almost astral, sway in a fauna of metallic and sucker pulsations, pushing back Funeral Cavern into its darker hidden recesses of its abyssal blackness. Heavy, ambient and very atmospheric, the music moves in the meanders of its underground labyrinth where some very deep cracks can filter a musical light. A light sieved quite quickly by elongated reverberations and sumptuous layers from caves' organs where reign an inexhaustible musical flora which is renewed in every descent as in every hidden recess. Steve Roach, without tribal rhythms, and Brian Eno are at the heart of this long and slow subterranean descent that is FUNERAL CAVERN. It's an album of a heavy Dark Ambient style that could scare any claustrophobic in you. I found that a bit long by moments, but at each new listening there is a mesmerizing musical iridescence that filled my ears. Certainly, fans of sequences won't be attracted by this bizarre ode, because there isn't shadow of a beat here. On the other hand, the musicale wealth coming from the circular pulsations and the crescendo of the wrapping analog synths manage to create an atmosphere of a surprising musical depth, where we are easily taking away by those breaths coming from a den with thousand cracks but also to a thousand of souls in perdition.
Sylvain Lupari (11/21/07) ***½**
Available at Musica Maxima Magnetica