dungeon synth / dark ambient
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
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
