Genre: Dark Ambient/Drone
Track Listing:
01 Mahavishnu
02 Forrest
03 First
04 Moerket
05 1920
06 Second
07 Sleep
08 Coma
The early releases Paradigms Recordings did were absolutely phenomenal. TAP's stunning Coma Waering, Hjarniaudi, Wraiths, and this. I forget what their wonderfully fruity description of this was, but whatever the case they were onto something with this release, as it's some of the most sublime music I own.
There seems to be three different elements of music here that've just been thrown together and left to wander around and interact with each other as they may. There's a lot of earth style drone-to-infinity guitars (although they could well just be distorted synths), lighter-than-air fragments of fennesz/hecker guitar processing, and a whole bunch of bubbling, spacey synths. I generally find the more space-heavy parts to be the best; Forrest in particular with these wild, transcendent flute lines hovering over the churning buzz and the epic that's 1920 builds, ebbs and generally drains you of everything; a truly fantastic mix of high, skittering synths and deep, mysterious rumble. All in all these elements make for some interesting contrasting elements and add up to way more then the sum of their parts.
It's also one of, if not the spaciest record I have in my collection. Everything about it just screams empty, inky infinity. It's definitely the production that makes this; the synths pulsing and winking nervously like alien signals or a neutron star, the massive low end adding a truly remarkable amount of space to it, reverberating and making the whole thing as cavernous and deep as possible. Indeed, I'd say this is some of the finest representation of space in any genre, and medium of art, even, that I've ever heard.
There's a few weak points where Mr.Ondo attempts to get a bit noisier and experimental (the shortest track comes instantly to mind) but for the most part this is just an extremely fine piece of ambient music. I like how it's unique, yet still very accessible, that it's one of the most evocative bits of music I've heard, ...and that it sounds great and I really enjoy listening to it. I think it's up there with Endless Summer, Talk Amongst the Trees and Harmony in Ultraviolet (though it's certainly far, far darker than those three albums) in terms of "best ambient of the last decade". Go and buy it while it's still available.
