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Writer's pictureSylvain Lupari

Spyra Hospital (2021)

Updated: Nov 12, 2023

The sum of the beautiful and good moments exceeds those you won't like at first

1 Prolog 7:22

2 Gebouw 5:55

3 Prozession 7:01

4 Lazarus 7:17

5 Fieber 8:30

6 Krisis 6:21

(CD/DDL 42:50) (V.F.)

(Dark Ambient, Orchestral, Movie)

Vibrations of machinery that fade into shadows along the walls. Whispers, those more discreet, more muffled and those that we hear. Chords... Footsteps in a hurry and orchestrations. Those more precise and those that hide beyond the shadows. Prolog deftly depicts what is hidden in that first visit to Chapel Hospital. The organ layers are gargantuan and inject a creepy ambience into an environment where even horse steps echo on the pavement. The music is orchestral with good arrangements of string and wind instruments. It depicts the characteristic features of the background of HOSPITAL. Keyboard chords startle us in the middle of Prolog. They are in symbiosis with the orchestrations and insisting on an ascending movement which rolls in loops until exhaustion. There, where a Mellotron releases a bank of mist with flute essences and where the scents of Force Majeure fight the attempts of resurrection of the keyboard. Phew...this one will be difficult! HOSPITAL follows the historical path of a hospital in Treysa, Schwalmstadt. For the purpose, Wolfram der Spyra has composed 2 music acts; one that plays in the background and another as the main music. For Spyra, the project goes beyond the scope of this CD which is supported by Groove nl in a beautiful artistic presentation. The cover includes a 6-page booklet of black and white photos, depicting the moods of this album where Remy and Klaus Schulze's nocturnal madness is in every act. The music? It requires love, passion and listening!

There is more than one burst in HOSPITAL. It starts with Gebouw and its explosions that spread a perfect anesthetic powder for a piano to put down a melancholic approach. Muffled knocks on the walls and the floor fill the ambiences that a violin outbids with tears of despair. The last third of Gebouw plunges us into an industrial agony with particularly good arrangements of a music much more effective in black and white. I was talking about jumping? The finale is as bad as the opening! The horse steps on the pavement are more precise in the opening of Prozession. Spyra signs on this title a small jewel of moving and movie music with a wave of celestial voices which go up towards the skies. Muffled explosions echo as riffs carve out a procession with a tone of gloom and grief. The orchestral melody that emerges is of a splendor that sawed both my legs off, jaw hanging. A great track, period! Lazarus offers a dark ambient structure. Bloops and blaaps can be heard in a dark hallway conducive to generating a form of paranoia. The orchestrations recall those moments of internal madness in Alan Parsons' classic The Fall of the House of Usher. It's dark and rhythmically lifeless and almost atonal were it not for a few solidified drops in a crystalline tone that are picked up by a piano sitting next to a wall and its roar. Fieber is also rhythmless but in its orchestral envelope more musical and inviting than Lazarus. Village bells announcing a funeral procession open Krisis and its sinister moods. The first two minutes of this track are as beautiful and melodic as in Prozession. The other side of Krisis' music resurrects this approach to interpret it roughly but still with this amazing sensitivity that gets lost in the parasitic waves and white noises of the prismatic ambiences coming out of HOSPITAL' s walls. Knocks on the bed bases and hurried steps of kids adorn these paranormal ambiences whose continuations are to be heard later with the 7th track of this album, Heilung which will be available for download only. It will be free for those who bought the album.

Not easy, HOSPITAL shows the amazing creativity of an artist who likes to keep his audience on their toes. Except that the sum of the beautiful and good moments exceeds these small strokes of genius that make us cringe and that we discover with more pleasure during the subsequent listening. Throw an attentive ear where the two soundtracks complete as well as challenge each other throughout the taming of an album full of good moments.

Sylvain Lupari (April 22nd, 2021) *****

Available at Groove nl

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