“The strength of a dark-ambient work is its capacity to seduce with ambiences loaded of weird and scarlet tones: this is Lament”
1 Weigthless Particles 8:30
2 Hoarfrost 8:55
3 Lament 3:25
4 And all which is not 24:13
5 Lurk 3:31
6 Below Ice 8:54
7 Reign of Dust 11:22
(CD 69:07) (V.F.)
(Dark ambient music)
The strength of a dark and ambient work is its capacity to seduce with atmospheres where screech, cry and float bloodless and scarlet tones. Do you remember this long dark and ambient work that ['ramp] and Markus Reuter have concocted in 2007? ceasing to exist had riveted fans of floating music, with scents of industrial music rotting in its toxic ashes, to their headphones. Almost 5 years later, Stephen Parsick and Markus Reuter are doing it again with a dark and intensely floating album that is commensurate with their unequaled talents to breathe life into dead structures. LAMENT is a powerful sound cocktail where the multiplicity of synth layers and buzzing guitars gives life to these scattered implosions that punctuate the almost dreamlike darkness of a cd that can be enjoyed thoroughly, curled up in the comfort of a good pair of headphones. It's an intense work that never ceases to seduce the minute it creeps into our ears.
Winds! Spectral and iridescent lamentations debauch the tranquility of Weigthless Particles. Agglutinated in an immense sound mass, they float with a mixture of threat and seraphic. The guitar gives off a scent of serenity with its brighter layers that defy the more intense and black ones of Stephen Parsick, while the fusion of their elements brings a touch of musicality on this atonal darkness where breezes of weeping-metal are squeaking in the mists of the Mellotron lost here and there. Purely ambient, Weigthless Particles defines the main lines of an album which is just as ambient. The good Hoarfrost cries of loneliness with its layers of guitars weeping in forms of solos, shouting its dismay in the morphic and abyssal sweets from synth layers which end up spreading its heavy dark veils. A stealthy fight between the guitar's distorted echo loops and the synth pads' density, guided by a biblical ferocity, brings the nice and dark Hoarfrost to its last sighs, where we still hear the last breaths of an exhausted guitar. Short but intense, Lament makes its beast roaring through loops of pulsations which gurgling with force in a lunar setting drawn by the waves of a guitar which borrows the Arabian breaths of a lost civilization. We have just crossed the borders of the beast and its den with the long and shapeless And all which is not which plunges us into agony. Heavy and black, the intro ends up dissipating its mephistophelic layers which howl like winds uprooting mountains in a powerful abyssal descent. There is a mixture of terror and scabrous poetry in these first 7 minutes which flay all forms of virginal thoughts and where the doubt between the coexistence of two parallel universes gradually melts. The vertiginous descent ends in a bath of fusions between these many synth layers and those of an abstract guitar which tears down the listener by the strength of their darkness and the serenity of their luminosities. We float in a strange linear waltz where the evanescent tranquility remains the prey of the internal storms which lurk all around this long fresco on nothingness. We can hear reminiscences of Michael Stearns' Chronos strolling here and there on a structure which gradually calms down. And we get there. We arrive at those pulsations and these murky implosions that fed the vampiric-['ramp] atmospheres of ceasing to exist. And while we thought that the Parsick- Reuter duo had reached the apotheosis of abstract art, And all which is not breathes again and reborn from its toxic ashes to embrace a final where the pernicious breaths of a crooked miscegenation lay down a honeyed ambience of satanic serenity which will be at the heart of a disconcerting finale with the good and melancholy Reign of Dust and the taciturn solos of Markus Reuter.
Lurk offers the first semblance of rhythm on LAMENT with Tibetan chimes that resonate in a strange black mass. Even if the winds roar with opacity, we can hear all these little sonorous details which make the strength of this dark union between Stephen Parsick and Markus Reuter. The atmosphere woven by this accumulation of multiple layers with disparate tones is as intense as poignant. Below Ice surprises us with the ferocity of its alienating lamentations. This time the descent is aggressive with these ululations of schizophrenia which bellows insanity in scattered implosions of ice. It's a skilful mix between the crystalline and frightening tones of Permafrost-Music for Hibernation and the Reutertronic lamentations which rise with its Babylonian cries above a finale to make dream the audio engineer of oceanographic depths. With their slightly poetic approaches, Below Ice and Hoarfrost marvellously separate the sepulchral ambiences that line the dark universe of LAMENT. And, drawn from the lair of And all which is not, Reign of Dust offers a most unexpected finale where rebirth exudes purity. It's a dreamlike nectar very rare in the works of Stephen Parsick and a monument of beauty in this intriguing ambient work that is LAMENT.
Sylvain Lupari (April 21st, 2013) *****
Available at [´ramp] Bandcamp