“Resilience Suite is a good album where PD comes out of his ambient zone to offer a solid Berlin School perfumed of vintage tones”
1 Resilience Suite 48:08
First Movement:
Walking on the empty Streets
Second Movement:
Virus Contamination-Fight
Third Movement: Death Solitude
Fourth Movement: Resilience
(DDL 48:08) (V.F.)
(Berlin School)
Tones sparkle and tinkle like dozens of sound stars lighting up a musical journey as attractive as that of Michael Stearns in Chronos. The tinkles become an acute linear movement, like a siren announcing a catastrophe, thus losing its musicality to join a sound mass which seems to circulate on the water. On the mists of the sea. A wave after one, these linear movements dissipate and add to the sparkles well hung on the black sky of a night when the streets of Italy are deserted. An echo is formed inside these loops, constituting a compact sound mass which strikes the lively oscillations of the sequencer a little before the 10th minute. RESILIENCE SUITE is the continuation of ... but at the End everything will be alright! composed and recorded spontaneously on the night of March 14. And if there was a strong smell of sadness on this composition, this album sheds new light after more than 30 days of confinement due to the Covid-19. This time, the composition is divided into 4 which are overlapping acts by separating the atmospheric phases by very rude sequenced oscillation phases. Like good Berlin School!
The first movement, Walking on the Empty Streets, is purely ambient and highlights a concert of stars and their tinkling which project yellow furrows onto the ocean. Virus Contamination-Fight is the second movement. And if its title says it all, the furious oscillations of the sequencer do it justice. There is no rhythm per se. Just a movement of sharp oscillations which come and go peck at the big virus. The framework remains the same, and only the color of the back and forth can vary. Streaks crack this spasmodic membrane to inject a strident light which breathes luciferian anger into this lively static movement. Organic noises are added, thus multiplying our interest in listening to this repressed violence in the powerlessness of finding an antidote. We are at war, and the army, like the enemy, hides in every detail. The drones swallow us at around 24 minutes, giving a very cosmic vision of what it can be to die in solitude. We are really in a black hole when the second movement of ambient rhythm shakes the torpor of this last thread attaching us to life. This fourth movement is called Resilience. And once again, the Perceptual Defence's vision with sequenced oscillations fluttering vividly in the cosmos is in every point exact with the vision of the title where one can easily imagine the dying person desperately fighting against death.
From a purely musical point of view, RESILIENCE SUITE is a good album where Gabriele Quirici comes out of his ambient phases, that he likes to write, in order to offer music that is well balanced in terms of ambiances and rhythms. Kind of like he did in Changing Images. If I found the first part very strong at the vision level in relation to the subject of the title, it is more complicated for the second half of the album where the music, as good as in the first part by the way, seems to me totally disconnected from the subject. But in the end, it's a pretty good Berlin School of the vintage years that Perceptual Defense is offering us with this RESILIENCE SUITE!
Sylvain Lupari (May 31st, 2020) ***½**
Available at Perceptual Defence Bandcamp