ambient / drone

Back in January I published a review for '7' by American ambient act Interface Type Seven (read). Back then it was winter. The streets and parks were covered with a thin layer of snow. I wrote "This is a perfect album for these cold winter evenings" and I mentioned a burning fireplace.

Today a heatwave is crushing Europe. A huge part of the continent now IS a burning fireplace. The sun is blistering. It hasn't rained in days, weeks even. So I was wondering if another dose of IT7 ambient would cool me off. In short: it didn't, but that doesn't say anything about the quality of this new album. 

As per usual, Interface Type Seven explores the regions of "slowism", somewhere between ambient, classical music, downtempo electronics and post rock. This time, the focus seems to lay on dramatic piano, nicely illustrated by opener 'Imminent'. Carefully, IT7 steps into the footsteps of Olafur Arnalds. The Boards Of Canada references from his previous album slowly disappear as title track 'Nonlinear' takes the piano towards something more playful. 

Yet, not to worry, fans of lingering drones and meandering soundscapes have plenty to look forward to. 'Aberrations' delivers those goodies in an immersive manner. 'Silence' attempts something similar, but on a church organ, so it seems. 'Fault' then drags us into the dark and mysterious shamanistic drones of ritual dark ambient. Talking about a varied album. The latter is probably my favorite track here, and comes highly recommended for droners of all ages.

So it seems that the album gradually descends into darkness. 'Labyrinthine' might sound like a friendly and somewhat rhythmic ambient tune at first but there is something impending, something useasy about it. In the end, the music nudges towards dungeon synth before 'Static' pushes the listener into ever droning quicksand. Perhaps it is cool enough down there. Nonetheless, 'Nonlinear' definitely is a varied and vivacious follow up to '7', one which comes highly recommended.


​Serge

dungeon synth / ambient / folk

A beautiful, sensible, amazingly poetic record, Ghosts of boscus cavus is the work of a French medieval folk ambient artist known as ElixiR, released on July 1st. With delicate and serene harmonies, that wonders throughout a sonorous conflagration of sincere devotional artistry, the general layout of the work is simple and elementary conscious of its monumental placidity, but splendidly sensational and beautiful, to say the least. With twelve tracks – Boscavium, Boscavum, Monastic ruins, Deus vult, A procession to war, Ghosts of boscus cavus, The holy glory, Une présence près des bois, Misericordiae, L'ordre du temple, Le grand maître, De Molay, Nearer my god to thee and Shelob - Shelob - Fantôme du passé – that are uncommonly more concise than what the genre usually presents, the level of artistic grace and sentiment present on Ghosts of boscus cavus is primordially relevant, formidably  created and exceptionally executed. For sure, reveals a talent that certainly knows how to display confidently a decent degree of competence, pragmatism and authenticity.  

With a dense parameter of harmonious expression, the volatile expansion by which the anatomy of the sound dilates itself is genuinely organic, although there is an inherent simplicity in the work that makes it abundantly profound and original. With a captivating style, that reunites at the epicenter of its serenity the wonderful sentence of a timeless dream, Ghosts of boscus cavus is an aggrandizing state of the art work, that filters, elevates and condensates at the axis of its marvelous extemporal innocence the sincere grace of existence, which unwittingly transmits a spiritual relevance that absorbs the grandiosity of the human nature. 

As I wrote some lines above, the general layers of the music present on the album are simple, but the conflagration of sincere elements, conglomerated at the center of calm and philosophic – sometimes delusional – harmonies, disperses among the dust of invisible planets the groundbreaking allegories upon which the music is created. And the impeccable feeling it generates evokes beyond the lucidity of reason the wonderful artistry that are concentrated behind the work.     

A splendid and sensational album, certainly one of the best of the genre released this year, Ghosts of boscus cavus is the infinite anthem played over and over again in the evening of a displaced and solitary cathedral lost in time. In the voracious ruins of a night that never ends, but recalls the savage sorrow of its bitterness, the music of ElixiR is a discreet blessing, that fantastically revolves around the world in a cloak of surreptitiously serene harmonies, displayed over and over again at the pure densities of the soul.   


Wagner

dungeon synth / dark ambient

bandcamp

Vast Beneath the Skies is a dungeon synth album released by Croatian artist Druad. Fifty-one minutes long, the record has seven tracks: Vast Beneath the Skies, Echo and the Sleeping Sea, A Nymph, Dawning over Their Forts in the Peaks, Last Woodland Warmth, The Great Twilight Wall and Temples Glowing White. With ethereal and cordially abstract symphonies amplified by medieval cosmogonies that evoke a magnificent universe of serene imponderability, the harmonious textures that gracefully comprehends its laborious commonalities are definitely quite simple, but enchantingly proverbial. The overall sound of this album, although can be easily defined as a basic endeavor within the genre, is profound and ardently beautiful. A consistent sonority that persistently evokes the soul of a lost era of untimely principles, the style of Druad, calm and serene, like dungeon synth has to be, is dense, constantly dissipating and gracefully eloquent; cohesive enough to be astoundingly ascendant and expansive, but without ever being monotonous, tiresome nor repetitive.    

A work that is filled with a transcendental calmness that trespasses the most grandiloquent, fertile and feverish intonations of its own harmonious predispositions, Vast Beneath the Skies is true and spiritually gifted old school dungeon synth. A tremendously intense album, its vastly comprehensible, pertinent and sincere melodies revolve around an ancient grace that sees beyond the ordinary elegance of the genre: it circulates above an everlasting sobriety that fluctuates between the splendor of its rhythmical lucidity in a lugubrious structure, and a sophisticated density, that analyzes the intermittent reactions of its own ambivalent magnificence, but always maintaining the simplicity that qualifies its sound as ostensibly beautiful and marvelously peculiar.

Despite the overall simplicity of the album, that untrained ears would easily confuse with amateurism, there is an imposing grace on Druad’s sound, that reveals the modest and contained sense of proportions the artist wonderfully preserves – whether it would be by a conscious acknowledgment of his musical limitations, by lack of decent and more complex equipment, or simply by a deliberate choice for simplicity – that knows how to compose a monumental record with equalized passion, never digressing out of the limits of his sincere and competent sense of artistry.    

A beautiful record that certainly aggregates more beauty, density and atmosphere to the genre, Vast Beneath the Skies is a repertoire of plausible and possible passions, that never lets the pretensions of its extraordinary ambitions to surpass the boundaries of its wonderful and lucid perceptions. A marvelous example of contained and crucially ordained, arranged atmospheres, that has no delusions of grandiosity about its own premises, this record is a declaration of authenticity engraved at the onset of the genre.


Wagner

dungeon synth

Barad-Dûr is a dungeon synth album, a split record between the artists Balrog and The Inquisitor, released in March 16. Thirty nine minutes long, it has eight tracks. The first three, by Balrog – Mount Doom, The Lands of Mordor and Sauron, the Necromancer – and the other five tracks by The Inquisitor: Rule Them All, Brightest of Stars, The Eye, The Strength of Men Failed and A Dangerous Business. The symbiosis of qualities between the two artists functions overall exceedingly well, as their styles have innumerable affinities, although they have unbearable differences as well. 

A great combination of talents, the first part of the album – with Balrog’s music – is characterized by a calm, but tempestuous anxiety, where the extemporal, but sonorous conflagration of harmonies makes the listener feel he is mentally transported to a solitary world of melancholy and despair, perpetually confined to a subtle, but hostile environment of surreal emotional deviations, somewhat eager to take a valuable price on his bravery, for having the outrageous courage of being on such a mordacious and afflictive eternal palace, where sorrow and cruelty are the disputable sovereigns. 

The Inquisitor part, although at first seems to be a continuation of Balrog’s, is a little more dense and sinister; nevertheless, the listener continues to be in a very conspicuous journey throughout a universe of inquisitive agony and tension. With serene and pleasant, but exceedingly fearful harmonies, that inspires the tenacity of underlying and undefined feelings, situated between curiosity and fear, the work done by The Inquisitor on his tracks is a formidable compliment of Balrog’s, although exhibits tenuous differences in texture and rhythm, as both artists possesses arbitrary distinctions in their styles, although they are firmly reconciled in this work, all the way through. The sound of Balrog can be felt being a little more implicit on his unraveling of an ambiguous universe of grace and oblivion, as The Inquisitor, on the other hand, is more explicit on his showcasing of an imponderable galaxy of sensibility and cynicism.  

A great album for dark ambient/dungeon synth enthusiasts, Barad-Dûr is a masterful and highly worthwhile work of art, immensely valuable for each and every second of its music. An enchanted journey through a world of underlying and majestic infinity, the sensible sonorous diagram devised to make the audience dive into an overwhelming universe of obliteration and precious reflection will make you wake up as a different version of yourself, so deeply the sound make you immerse, so distant is the universe created and explored by this marvelous duo, as they reveal themselves incredibly capable and elevated high-ranking artists.   

 
Wagner