electronic / ambient
Above Me Weeps the Sky is the most recent release by Finnish legendary underground soundscape artist Juha-Matti Rautiainen, a master in conceiving, designing and sculpting organic atmospheric layers of imponderable and grandiose virtuosity, that playfully engraves over the majesty of its discreet, but pungent and consistent melodies the dehydrated realities of a diluted horizon of ambivalent and diffusive mordacity. Already in the beginning, this album passionately awoke the curiosity of my sonorous sensitivity.
With eight tracks – Above Me Weeps the Sky, Those Who Were Left, Darkly the Bleak Clouds, On the Beach, Dreaming, I Wing, I Fly, Transmission, My Loved Ones Are Waiting at Home and Void – the artist works on this album with an abundant confluence of disparate and versatile elements, but rearranges them in a mosaic of ambiguously hallucinatory lucidity, upon which they converge perfectly and harmoniously in a very cohesive sonorous texture. The first song, my favorite, which is the title track, is a calm, transcendental and beautiful ascendant symphony, that makes you travel to a distant timeframe of your conscience, that slowly and gracefully escalates to a dense, yet quietly fascinating serenade of melodic melancholy, with a suggestive imagery reminiscent of an emotional day of gray solitude and infinite rain. On the music of Juha-Matti Rautiainen, a latent and pervasive poetic density impregnates the sound, in proverbially humane, urban and dilated scales.
The second song, Those Who Were Left, is much more dense and sinister; this is the point where the sound becomes darker, somnolent, numb, prominently stricken with a mortifying sensibility that is absurdly grotesque, but concomitantly reluctant with its own somber and lugubrious nature. The third song, Darkly the Bleak Clouds, appears to merge the main elements of the first two, being a quintessential philosophic and serene quasi-ballad, that drives you to a ghostly, but familiar universe of relentless calmness – with the sound of thunderstorms in the background – that immerses the listener in a comfortable realm of soft grace and solitary introspection.
Gradually, you lose yourself in a sonorous labyrinth of opalescent frivolities, cold atmospheres and imponderable disturbances, that aggregates into the genre a different perception of space and sound, complying with a more delicate, fragile, personal and sensible dynamic.
Definitely an exceptional album – conceived with an intricate, expansive and proficient degree of originality –, Above Me Weeps the Sky is one of the best ambient/ dark ambient releases that I’ve ever heard. Never restricting himself to the commonalities of the genre, but working abundantly with more ambitious and versatile elements, Juha-Matti Rautiainen displays on this work an excellent degree of authenticity. He deliberately conceives a new horizon of perspectives, that certainly makes him one of the most essential contemporary underground artists of the genre, and one from only a handful of others that is skilled and audacious enough to design and efficiently apply highest standards for electronic ambient music.
Wagner
With eight tracks – Above Me Weeps the Sky, Those Who Were Left, Darkly the Bleak Clouds, On the Beach, Dreaming, I Wing, I Fly, Transmission, My Loved Ones Are Waiting at Home and Void – the artist works on this album with an abundant confluence of disparate and versatile elements, but rearranges them in a mosaic of ambiguously hallucinatory lucidity, upon which they converge perfectly and harmoniously in a very cohesive sonorous texture. The first song, my favorite, which is the title track, is a calm, transcendental and beautiful ascendant symphony, that makes you travel to a distant timeframe of your conscience, that slowly and gracefully escalates to a dense, yet quietly fascinating serenade of melodic melancholy, with a suggestive imagery reminiscent of an emotional day of gray solitude and infinite rain. On the music of Juha-Matti Rautiainen, a latent and pervasive poetic density impregnates the sound, in proverbially humane, urban and dilated scales.
The second song, Those Who Were Left, is much more dense and sinister; this is the point where the sound becomes darker, somnolent, numb, prominently stricken with a mortifying sensibility that is absurdly grotesque, but concomitantly reluctant with its own somber and lugubrious nature. The third song, Darkly the Bleak Clouds, appears to merge the main elements of the first two, being a quintessential philosophic and serene quasi-ballad, that drives you to a ghostly, but familiar universe of relentless calmness – with the sound of thunderstorms in the background – that immerses the listener in a comfortable realm of soft grace and solitary introspection.
Gradually, you lose yourself in a sonorous labyrinth of opalescent frivolities, cold atmospheres and imponderable disturbances, that aggregates into the genre a different perception of space and sound, complying with a more delicate, fragile, personal and sensible dynamic.
Definitely an exceptional album – conceived with an intricate, expansive and proficient degree of originality –, Above Me Weeps the Sky is one of the best ambient/ dark ambient releases that I’ve ever heard. Never restricting himself to the commonalities of the genre, but working abundantly with more ambitious and versatile elements, Juha-Matti Rautiainen displays on this work an excellent degree of authenticity. He deliberately conceives a new horizon of perspectives, that certainly makes him one of the most essential contemporary underground artists of the genre, and one from only a handful of others that is skilled and audacious enough to design and efficiently apply highest standards for electronic ambient music.
Wagner
