“It's like a book where the intensity and magnetism increase from chapter to chapter, always keeping the best for last”
1 Ether 4:57
2 Dimensional 6:21
3 Day of Dissonance 4:09
4 A Serge Story 4:59
5 Automelody 3:45
6 Alienation 4:32
7 Harmonic Deviation 6:16
8 Liberation 8:16
9 Walking Alone 6:01
(CD/LP/DDL 49:16) (V.F.)
(Analog Modular EM)
Ether begins DIMENSIONAL with a tonal rise where sounds hatch like pigments on a blank canvas. Their mechanical buzzes spread an ambient mass. It's like the discovery of an atom which takes its expansion in a too narrow tube, obliging its mass to get along with an apprehension of explosion so much it has become compact and intense. It even looks like it pierces around 3 minutes leaving beads to erupt. They ring and resound in this fascinating impression that Ether is putting pressure on and finally dies down in silence. It could have been something else, since the art of modular electronic music has no boundaries. This latest Parallel Worlds album offers a dozen tracks produced and played entirely on the systems Eurorack and Serge modular. The titles here are raw forces of a creator's imagination in pursuit of its roots.
Beeps and a line of oscillations with electronic language are the beginnings of the ambient rhythm of Dimensional. These elements rotate in loops on a line of static bass-pulses. Other elements are grafted, such as organic squeaks and percussive elements which stabilize a rhythmic structure. This mesh of sounds frolics on the reflection of the loops which become blinking kaleidoscopic shapes while the organic noises become a source of sneer in the background. Again, that can be other things… and it melts in the ears. Day of Dissonance imposes a cinematographic presence with an opening on the ocean floor where the azure winds merge into the large mouth of fascinating oscillations where crumbs of sound begin to shiver. From a musical point of view, it gives a delicate spasmodic movement whose staccato foments a dark vision. All the sounds create a rhyme of a Halloween Covid-19 genre with our ears scanning a dismal sounding alley. Pure Bakis Sirros! A Serge Story is born from the effects of a marble rolling and wandering on a staircase with multiple landings. She lands in a dismal place where the floor and its vibrations forge a bed of reverberations where the drops of water, attracted by the tone of the marbles, come out of the foundations to offer a concerto for marbles that is lost in wooshh where sneers a last ball being shelled. It comes back to what I wrote above ...
Describing Automelody is like saying that from hollow winds and wooshh a vampiric melody is formed which extends its tentacles of charms in oblong spiral movements which coils all around you. Prismatic and ambient! Slow and captivating, Harmonic, Deviation is a superb movement very Berlin School inspired by Edgar Froese. It's arguably possible the jewel of DIMENSIONAL and the kind of title to be part of a compilation. Liberation is no exception and could just as easily be part of a compilation called Genius Hits! The title imposes itself from its first bars with stubborn beats which resonate and buzz in the ambience of a fright factory. Having become disordered, the beats crumble into multiple percussive elements called to disappear while a wave of reverberations haunts the place. Drops of sound form and dance to revive the first percussive movement of Liberation. At this level, the track opens like a psychedelic fauna with a drop in its intensity to rebound in a real rhythm-king and its percussive subjects twirling all around. This brilliant Parallel Worlds album ends with Walking Alone and its melody played on a piano in an ambience of fleeting madness where the piano notes start to derail and to regroup in an ambience that depicts this endless corridor where we run and runs in order to escape to this nocturnal madness when the dream turns into nightmare.
These 9 titles of Bakis Sirros in DIMENSIONAL will never be able to explain all the genius of the Greek musician who year after year, regardless of the label, succeeds in creating from scratch rhythms and melodies which cannot be explained but which must be heard. This new album, available on vinyl, manufactured CD and in download, is like a book where the intensity and magnetism increase from chapter to chapter, always keeping the best for last. DIMENSIONAL! A story to hear from Ether to Walking Alone…
Sylvain Lupari (March 10th, 2021) ****½*
Available at Móatún 7 Music Bandcamp