“Atmospheres is very fine ambient musicwhere Rudy Adrian uses the winds and its elements to fill our ears with great phases of serenity”
1 Apple Tree Bay 5:36 2 Atmospheres 4:14 3 Willow Bank 4:13 4 Blue Horizon 4:52 5 Through a Cave into Another World 6:02 6 Amber Skies 5:30 7 Beyond the Silver River 8:09 8 Temple on an Island 9:33 9 Dreams of Subantarctica 11:12 SpottedPeccary| SPM2601
(CD/DDL/Spotify 59:22) (V.F.)
(Ambient soundscapes)
It's been a long time since we heard new music from Rudy Adrian. Since 2010 in fact with the Distant Stars album. Always faithful to his ambient spaces of his earlier works, to his sonic landscapes without movements, the New Zealand synthesist floods our ears with a concert of winds which sing all of their oniric colors. ATMOSPHERES is a quiet album. Very quiet and so intimately bewitching. Except for some ambiospherical jolts very finely-shaded, this last Rudy Adrian's album is a choir of airstreams where the winds take on their clothes of passive turbulences as those of voices as ethereal as the color of the dreams.
The sounds are exceptionally rich and the music wraps us from the first strikes of oars of Apple Tree Bay and its synth lines which harmonize the chants of the winds of which the surges are grazing the colors of the rainbow, deporting some fine chimed particles which sparkle on a bass line with passive scattered stammerings. The ambiences are weaved tightened. There are no empty holes with this symphony of winds and of their roarings which sometimes sound like singings from mermaids of woods. A discreet and delicate flute scatters its breezes throughout this slow linear waltz, testifying of a sound wealth which gets all our attention. These textures and its sound elements in perpetual fight between passivity and emotion make of every track nice sonic puzzle where the colors of the intensity are pushed back in some deeply enveloping ambient movements. The title-track is as much stillness and the ambiences are more penetrating with winds which whistle with a surprising musicality. With its synth lines which tear the silence of its wings of zephyr, its voices lost in the nuances of the claws from trade winds and its carillons which sparkle such as some snow imprisoned between opposite air streams, Willow Bank and Temple on an Island are monuments of meditation. The same goes for the very quiet Amber Skies and its fine nuances in the colors of the winds which murmur breaths as warm as the memories of a gone friend. Shaped in the same meditative mold, but decorated with the singings of whales, Blue Horizon also enchants. Through a Cave into Another World leads us towards a more shamanic dimension with rattlers, carillons and spiritual incantations which float over the delicate pearls of a pensive piano of which the notes got lost in the course of winds. With some very enveloping, sometimes even dramatic, ambiences, Beyond the Silver River is a track as much magnetizing as Through a Cave into Another World where the fine implosions of a bass line create passive ambiospherical eddies. The rattlers which crisscross such as winds in search of an obstacle are also attractive as the singings of the monks hidden in the drizzle of winds. We find these magnetizing chants of these rattlers on the very wrapping Dreams of Subantarctica; a sonic blink to Adrian's very first ambient odyssey in 1992 with a first album called Subantarctica. The longest musical piece of ATMOSPHERES is as quieter as the eight other ones, but it releases an even more intense emotion. The winds shout more than they whistle while that quite slowly an elvish voice rises over the lapping waters, murmuring a soft astral song which quietly leads us where our intuitions and those of Rudy Adrian become passively entangled.
The biggest strong point of ATMOSPHERES is this solid perception to see, to feel Rudy Adrian's sonic landscapes. It's a beautiful album of ambient music where the strength and the color of the winds as well as the ambiences, as ethereal as tribal, create some bewitching contrasts which flow into our ears like a cornucopia of ambiospherical plenitude where the airs of the breezes take the shapes of our intuitions. Since its discovery, it accompanies me in my sleeps, so joining the big quiet works of Steve Roach and Michael Stearns.
Sylvain Lupari (March 22nd, 2014) ***½**
Available at Spotted Peccary Music