“A bit more audacious than usual, Connected! has all of those things that delight the hearing while listening good old EM”
1 The Smell of Fear 17:08 2 They Live in the Black Hole 13:31 3 Into Temptation 12:16 4 Inside That Thing! 16:19 5 Syndromeda's Soundpool 9:37 Syngate | CD-r SS20
(CD-r/ DDL 68:52) (V.F.) (Sequencer-based style and dark ambient Berlin School)
One has to see the artwork to understand all the meaning of this last album from Danny Budts.
The threads of his beast get to plug all over his head! And it's a bit much of what is made the universe of Syndromeda. We have to approach the music of the Belgian synth wizard with a very good open-minded. We have to see his music with our ears or to hear it with the eyes. It depends. We have to see its colors and hear its forms to be muddled and to cross swords with a surrealist universe. And CONNECTED!, as the very great majority of Syndromeda's works, it's the universe of EM and of its infinite possibilities.
It's by way of intersidereal winds that The Smell of Fear tries an approach between our ears. We recognize straightaway the musical signature of Syndromeda with these multiple chirping and these rustles of another dimension which assail the tranquility of the cosmic breezes and these waves which wrap them delicately. It might be ambient that the territory seems to be marked by a subtle scent of discomfort. Mocking keys start skipping a little after the bar of 6 minutes. Their organic tones also release this perfume of cosmic psychedelism which often roam over Danny Budts' music. These keys skip and frolic with their shadows while nasal synth lines infiltrate the passive dance of sequences with moiré breezes and with shadows of twisted solos. If delicate and imprecise, the rhythm structure of The Smell of Fear swells its pressure with bass sequences which accentuate and weigh down a pace, always so passive, which force-feeds itself with a fusion of sequences and of which the chirping and the deep heavy steps uncork towards one finale where the brief fluidity of the rhythm gets lost in the borders of cosmos. After another ambio-cosmic intro, which surrounds by the way the 5 tracks of CONNECTED!, where a choir of ghost children exhume its chants and its murmurs in slow layers of reverberations, They Live in the Black Hole proposes a slow spherical figure of rhythm. A troop of jumping keys, in tones of bass and in tones of organic chirping, organizes an ascent under sinister synth lines filled by resonances and by hummings and of which the electronic effects amplify the decoration of an analog universe that Syndromeda is watering with good solos, as sharpened than magnetized. I very well liked that. The breezes which wrap the introduction of Into Temptation plunges us straight into the very acidified universes that we find on Klaus Schulze's first albums. We can hear dusts of ether to roar in these lugubrious winds which little by little reveal the delicate approach of an upward rhythm and its linear movement decorated of subtle caresses of a synth on the whole rather melancholic. This is a good track, with a good ambient rhythm, which connects me with the works of Schulze, post Cyborg. Inside That Thing! is an audacious ambiospherical track, kind of ambient tribal, which presents a first part sculptured through the stitches of fine modulations and the waves of subtle impulses. Slender reverberations and blades of synth dig up hoarse voices which mumble such as the lamentations of the Lord of didgeridoo, drawing a slender parallel with Steve Roach's odes to desert. The attraction lies in these impulses which quietly lay the foundations for a rhythm which inflates its pace in secret. We however have to wait at the edge of 10 minutes to hear this rhythm to hatch. It's soft and adopts the steady pulsations of an ambient movement of techno, while Inside That Thing! is shaking more crystal-clear keys which hiccup in a beautiful phase of rhythm, rather complex, which irradiates all the dark charms of Syndromeda's works. With a track name like Syndromeda's Soundpool, we understand that we enter into Danny Budts' sonic pantry. Sinister winds, voices from beyond the grave, slow corrosives reverberations, electronic chirping and sketch of rhythm which mislaid its sequences in an ocean of dissonances; all the arsenal which furnishes the complex structures of Syndromeda is lying here as a skin which wants to be inflated. And it happens! By a rhythm which spits its drumming in the reflections of sequences sparkling like the black charms of Halloween and the iridescent chants of synth solos to the magnetizing braids. In fact, Syndromeda's Soundpool is very in the style CONNECTED!, but with a bigger psychedelic display where the rhythm, as the ambiences, arises from the oblivion of the beast to the thousand threads to finish by taking a shape of which the charms will never be to ignore.
Sylvain Lupari (December 2nd, 2014) ***½**
Available at SynGate Bandcamp