Parallel Worlds & Alio Die Circo Divino (2010)

“Circo Divino is for fans of deep ambient music, of sounds and musical experiments”

1 Lost Fractales 10:28 2 Circo Divino 10:09 3 Nuvole di Palissandro 9:12 4 Sorinel 8:29 5 Electrostatic Forest 5:15 6 Slide of Grace 10:13

Hic Sunt Leones | HSL055 LP

(CD/DDL 53:45) (V.F.) (Dark ambient EM)

With Parallel Worlds, the musical project of the Greek musician Bakis Sirros, we must expect the unpredictable in all its amazing splendor. Undertaken in 2008 and worked by email and the magic of the Internet with Alio Die and India Czajkowska, CIRCO DIVINO is a strange mystical reverie where the listener is constantly torn between unreality, tranquility of the inconsistency of mystery and the magical beauty of the odes of a fantastic universe where goblins, ghosts and trolls frolic in a musical forest with paths that intersect in a hybrid musical world where the ambient crosses a slow and heavy rhythm in a panoply of sounds as mystifying as heterogeneous, even syncretic, awakening and renewing the imagination as well as the wonder with each listening.

A hypnotic wave with slow undulations that bathe in a chime-like atmosphere opens Lost Fractales. This first title reflects the atmosphere which reigns on this album with a vague rhythm, but whose evolution is in constant progression thanks to the intensity of the movements. A progressive environment, since not entirely atonal, where the passive rhythm remains constantly suspended. Here, like on the other CIRCO DIVINO tracks, the listener is struck by a most original sound richness where the vocalizations of half-girl and half-woman overhang an environment that is both caustic and metallic. A surprisingly rich musical universe that bends under the weight of its hidden harmonies in its innumerable chime movements. Discovering a world of sonority with crystalline prisms and chords of guitars lost in a mist of glasses, its percussions as discreet as they are efficient and its abstract modular movements which create a very effective dramatic tangent. The title-track Circo Divino sounds like a strange cerebral western with its undulations which imitate a lonely cowboy approach. A cowboy who furrows a dark valley whose narrow musical paths are filled with sounds which would sow a night terror. The rhythm is still blurred, floating between a hellish atonal world where rattlesnake tones, ether winds, wind ripples and Aboriginal spectral waves flow in a chimerical world where the power of sounds prevails over a structure with a gently dreamy maelstrom and whose dark and frantic strikes of veiled percussions slowly drumming under a dark sky and streaked with strata as metallic as waving. Cinema for the ears!

More lively, Nuvole di Palissandro pulses under the good enveloping layers of a synth that is warmer and more fluty in an equally mysterious ambience. One has the vague impression of being buried under a cave stuffed with thick morphic clouds. Without doubt the most melodious title of CIRCO DIVINO. Sorinel is bathed in an unreality with heavy pulsations whose accelerated pulse, furtive whispers and the dark oscillations of a metallic synth plunges us into a succulent sonic paranoia. A bit like on Lost Fractales, the tempo is fractured and oscillates under crystalline prisms and guitar chords emerging from a sinister sound swamp where the spiked voices of India Czajkowska slide towards a dementia which is agitated under pulsations and sucks more and more frantic of a synth with muddy tones. As its title suggests, Electrostatic Forest is engulfed by tones of carillon prisms in a cave with endless crystal droplets. Without doubt the wisest title of this latest musical madness from Parallel Worlds. Slide of Grace would conclude this album like Lost Fractales had started it. A long arrhythmic track where the tempo remains undecided and finds its foundations under its strange percussive pulses which dot the rhythmic wake of the album. The atmosphere is still as twisted with its glass tones which mingle with its heavy drones with sustained reverberations, mixing the modular breaths of a sometimes-abstract synth sometimes harmonious.

In the experimental ambient genre, CIRCO DIVINO remains the best! Bakis Sirros, Alio Die and India Czajkowska combine their experimental perceptions to offer a different kind of ambient music. An atmospheric music where the rhythm is played by the intensity of the modulations and the bewitchment of the innumerable tones which invariably draws strange arcs and sound modulations which catch the hearing and order new listening. A captivating musical world, unique to the audacity and perseverance of Bakis Sirros for his constant quest for new sounds and whose fusion with the drone master Alio Die can only give amazing results. An album commensurate with its musical enchantment for amateurs of experiments, because beyond all its perceptions the approach of Parallel Worlds remains inexplicably harmonious.

Sylvain Lupari (June 21th, 2011) ****½*

SynthSequences.com

Available at Alio Die & Parallel Worlds Bandcamp