“Here's an album with a thousand sonic prisms that sparkle and swirl in the corridors of a cosmos that is both radiant and intriguing”
1 Kaleidoscopic Image I 1:58
2 Kaleidoscopic Dreams 11:14
3 Kaleidoscopic Image II 8:55
4 Confessions of a Colormachine 6:10
5 Playground Mystique 4:05
6 Changing Places 13:43
7 Surreal Darkness 10:55
8 Kaleidoscopic Surrealism 10:30
AmbientLive– ALR3017
(CD 67:35) (V.F.)
(Ambient Cosmic EM)
Recorded between 2000 and 2003, KALEIDOSCOPIC SURREALISM is, as its title suggests, an album with a thousand sonic prisms that sparkle and swirl in the corridors of a cosmos that is both radiant and intriguing. A mostly quiet album in which René Van Der Wouden multiplies crystal clear chords and crystalline effects in a musical universe frozen in its oblong evolutions. Certainly, there are catchy titles such as Confessions of a Colormachine and Playground Mystique, but the rest is a sweet galactic symphony that resembles to Tomita in his cosmic works.
A delicate and poetic opus that begins with dark chords staggering in a misty cosmos. Kaleidoscopic Image I goes there with a taciturn opening, even with these seductive percussive effects of rattlesnakes clinking between the soft idle layers which undulate lazily in an iridescent universe with its thousand sound prisms. Kaleidoscopic Dreams pursues this morphic sweetness with a solitary guitar whose chords float in a soft ethereal mist covered by the echoes of the bluish streaks. It's a movement full of tenderness and romance where pleasant voices of astral mermaids delicately copulate to drummed chords which create a nervous flow on good orchestral arrangements. The intergalactic strata follow the movement of a violins section while the rhythm becomes more vitaminized, more punctuated by saccades of violins. Kaleidoscopic Image II takes up the soft ethereal ambiences with chimeric harp chords which go astray in an effect of statism with fairly Vangelis tones which are as lugubrious as iridescent from particle of sounds and stars which spin in a musical firmament with heavy resonances. Despite this static violence, Kaleidoscopic Image II is a sweet dreamlike moment which floats with beautiful flying layers and nice orchestrations which are lost in the shadows of a cosmos tanned of these layers which flee with beautiful lyrical tenderness.
Confessions of a Colormachine is heavier with good percussion and a slightly more rock keyboard on a limpid and jerky minimal rhythm which filters the multiple harmonious breezes of the synth. Playground Mystique presents an undulating rhythm with a synth and its breaths of a trombone which is surrounded by crystalline chords twirling frivolously. Changing Places takes us out of this animated portion of the album to bring us back into this long corridor of meditative atmospheres, or rather dreamy I would say, of KALEIDOSCOPIC SURREALISM. A space ode flown over by musical meteorites whose sounds are as beautiful as they are heterogeneous and are trapped in this long corridor filled with heavy reverberation and notes of lost pianos. We are in a cold cosmos, sometimes musical, with kaleidoscopic hues of a synth and its soft hypnotic movements and its ripples riddled with sound reflections. Reflections that vibrate in this polyhedron void to continue in the morphic and metallic breaths of Surreal Darkness and the oceanic tranquility of Kaleidoscopic Surrealism. There where the strata slowly waltz into an astral void inhabited by kaleidoscopic tones in a universe of shimmering prisms that is both unreal and attractive.
Sylvain Lupari (October 23rd, 2009) *****
Available at REWO Bandcamp