“Democratizing a musical style that can frighten the ears in its form of more experimental music, Elements and Particles responds admirably to its vocation”
1 Floating World 8:42 2 Magnetic Lullaby 6:37 3 Additive Procedure 5:57 4 Euneirophrenia 7:54 5 Overtone 6:39 6 Radar Hill 7:23 7 Your Strange Glitter 5:03 8 Prophet & Loss 5:03 9 Marine Layer 7:01 DiN-TS02 (DDL 60:10) (V.F.) (Modular Synth Music)
A shadow of sound rises from nothingness. Like a finger touching a smooth surface, dozens of mini circles turn into reverberant effects that purr like a machine from darkness. These circles seem to float with graceful winged movements and avoid evanescent obstacles that come and go in a sound palette where brief pulses sculpted in a dropper vibrate. Thriller and tension cinema effects go by lazily on a structure that the musician knits as the seconds reach the 8:42 minutes' point. Floating World from Todd Barton, a well-known American musician who specializes in the Buchla modular synth universe, opens the second volume of DiN's Tone Science series. Like in Structure and Forces, ELEMENTS AND PARTICLES offers 9 sonic chapters that represent the other side of the electronic universe; the one that creates the moods in movies, documentaries and/or commercials. A universe in which harmonies take a back seat and where sounds and textures are real treats for the ears and the speakers. Some artists push the reflection further by grafting harmonious textures on a carpet of samplings and effects from analog and/or modular synthesizers. Like this fascinating, and ultimately delicious, lullaby from Bluetech, Magnetic Lullaby, which is sublime and very musical in this realm of experimental tones. Complex and mystifying, Additive Procedure is very representative Parallel Worlds' universe who excels in the art of creating completely unexpected rhythms in moods beyond this world. Paul Nagle's Euneirophrenia is a bit of the same kind, the dark envelope in less! Its introduction is teeming of tonalities without identities that end up clinging to a rhythm sequence as curt as the shots of a woodpecker on hardwood. We are talking here of a rhythm not meant to dance, but to follow its current with our ears which detect a kind of telegraph with an alphabet coded in secret. David Bessell proposes in Overtone a music of ambiances that would go very well in an enchanted forest where the gorgeous blonde princess waltzes between secret traps on a beautiful texture of flutes.
Radar Hill from the Isle of Man's Englishman Richard Quirk is the kind of mood music that would give an even more Mephistophelic texture to a film like Silent Hill. The synth waves come out with slow impulses that make me think of these elephant airs, more discreet here, by Jean-Michel Jarre in Ethnicolor. The echo effects stimulate these sound waves that agglutinate like sea waves rolling on their balls of sound foam. With a little imagination, I hear the hubbub of a crowd pushing and, on the edge, to make falling a wall. Hainbach is a German musician who likes to create ambiances in movement. His title Your Strange Glitter is one of the most fascinating, at the level of tones, in this 2nd collection from the Tone Science series. Very bright arpeggios react like those lights that shine intermittently on an exposed electric module. Snaps of a strange sound texture get grafted to this chant of unpredictable jingles, leading to a structure dominated by a clang of tonalities as much variegated than the discontinuous flow of Your Strange Glitter. Nathan Moody is a California sound designer who likes to create movies for our imagination only. Prophet & Loss is the second title that hooks our ears from the first listening in this ELEMENTS AND PARTICLES, the other being Magnetic Lullaby, at least for my tastes. It's a title armed with a slow rhythm with very Redshift vibes, at the level of sound thrillers. Glaucous batrachian beats, which multiply with the echo effects, and other beats enrich an even darker opening with fumes from a radioactive synth line. This unexpected rhythm, built by elements just as improbable, amazes my ears with its texture gnawed by dystrophic effects. Its progression is stimulated by a clear demonic intensity and ends with a crash effect that doesn't alleviate this feeling of dread anchored admirably by an evolution that has crawl beneath our skin. A good find! It's R Beny's Marine Layer that soothes this sensation of cinematic terror with a rather relaxing music where the model of azure breezes of the ambient music vogues with a slight perfume of industrial ambiances. A genre that likes to concoct this other musician from California.
Democratize a musical style that can frighten the ears in its form of more experimental music, this 2nd volume of Tone Science by DiN label responds admirably to its vocation. The music is more lively than dead, and the sounds have a richness that can only seduce. ELEMENTS AND PARTICLES is the perfect sequel to Structure and Forces, as well as introducing us to other artists working in an area where the 7th art would be meaningless without their creativity. Sylvain Lupari (October 6th, 2018) ***** SynthSequences.com
Available on DiN Bandcamp