“In spite of an almost total darkness, there are good moments of the rhythms which get excited and especially an incredible atmosphere of end times”
1 The Death 3:30
2 The Prince 5:38
3 The Queen 5:49
4 The Castle 6:06
5 The Morgue 7:44
6 The Bard 4:00
7 The Absolute Zero 10:46
8 Someone will always be waiting 2:33
9 The Song about the End 11:58
10 The Observatory 2:25
11 The Eye of Horus | 6:15
12 Dead Angels scattered about the Floor 6:04
(CD/DDL 72:53) (V.F.)
(Deep dark ambient music)
HOELLENENGEL is a dark ambient opus that has its roots in the imagination of the German synthesist. Strongly inspired by Blade Runner from Vangelis, Stephen Parsick
has created his own story by attaching his musical vision to it. Hoellenengel is an angel of hell who torments and disturbs those they visit. And it's from the depths of darkness that the acrid breaths pierce the walls of innocence. As on Blade Runner, and its brownish vapors, dark metallic lines with industrial taste arise in an opaque universe load from orchestrations of ghouls. HOELLENENGEL then becomes a slow and tenebrous procession with heavy and tight movements which follows a tangent at once lugubrious and harmonious. On the wings of a devious angel, the opus waltzes on sluggish movements where some melodies arise from a mephistophelic nothingness as if by magic, awakening our apathetic stupor. It's a universe of darkness with buzzing sounds that scan the black horizon, like the glass eye of cyclops illuminating the shaded towers and whose rotating axis sweeps the pulsations and its reverberations. And this world of HOELLENENGEL is as black as it's sordidly strange.
It's a growing nebulosity where life dies more than it lives. In spite of this almost total darkness, there are good times when the rhythms get excited like on The Queen where Stephen Parsick surprises with a movement of the sequencer built on an analog base. There is also rhythm on The Bard. The rest! It's the ashes of angels that invade a stuffy universe where the light has ceased to live, and life gets living in haggard eyes. The beauty of the album is measured in its design. It's a long-improvised process and entirely played on a digital recorder. There is no sequencer, PC, nor MIDI and / or multitrack interfaces. Woven in a haunting darkness, this gloomy fair is built note by note so to give an amazing result in the end. HOELLENENGEL is a dark album where the ambient and the experimental moods are inspired by the sounds of Vangelis as well as the tribal darkness of Steve Roach and the weightlessness effects that we find on the brilliant Chronos from Michael Stearns. With such inspiration, Stephen Parsick weaves the dark vibes of a story that can only be attractive, even with its prophetic heaviness.
Sylvain Lupari (August 11th, 2007) *****
Available at Stephen Parsick Bandcamp