ambient / drone / post rock
Variaciones cromáticas del Atlántico is an album released in the beginning of October by Spanish ambient/soundscape/post rock group Sans Soleil. Forty-four minutes long, the record has five relatively extensive tracks: Myosotis, Cian, Índigo, Cobalto and Cerúleo. With beautiful, graceful, delicate layers of sound, the music of Sans Soleil on this album can be described as an exuberant journey through the vicinities of marvelously colorful, dense and placid musical tonalities, albeit a little repetitive. Fully predisposed to embellish harmonies of abundant splendor – that are gracefully dilated over the tissue of its own quintessential, but dispersive ambivalences –, the tenacious, gentle and virtuous diligence of the group’s style serves as the main fuel for a simple, but primordial musical mosaic of ephemeral, but sober variations on lethargic excellence, that consecrates the vastness of its gracious beauty over the placid anatomy of its diluted, but flexible sonorous features.
The style of the group is vivaciously sensible, but also ardently oscillating. Underneath the sound, there is a mordacious, dual and consequential emptiness, whose emotional underlying vicissitudes are converted to more unexpected, but sincere forms of artistry. While the beauty is definitely overwhelmed by layers of dramatic effervescence, the melodies rotate over an axis of impulsive tension, which is something deliberately propelled by its slow acerbically rhythmic dissonances, that always advances discreetly through the surface of the melodies. So, while superficially we have a calmer disposition of sound, the inherent structure of the music is being condensed to liquefy into a more abrasive, though stable layout. The third and fourth tracks – Índigo and Cobalto – greatly exemplify this quiet musical dynamic, whose inherent structure is subject to a flexible degree of tension, that inevitably wanders over its own imperative fugacious drift.
While the music of Sans Soleil is simple, its different layers are all competently conceived, elaborated and executed. Over the more indefinite precipice of its sensible and dilated extravaganza, calmness is an element ardently conceived beyond a consistent measure; harmonies remain vagrant in an ascendant journey, but rotating over a vivacious continuity that definitely reinvents the qualitative principle of its own peripheral autonomy. Which means that its elegant calmness reluctantly enjoys a pungent level of solidarity within the sound, but is never isolated. It has a favorable relation of symbiosis with a regressive solitude, that always anticipates its elucidative consequences in the music, as a whole.
While the harmonies are well created, and exhibit consistent features, never dismantled by its intuitive oceans of serenity, Variaciones cromáticas del Atlántico is a good album with a great beginning, but a declining conclusion. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of the album becomes too uniform towards the end, and its excessive musical stability – that never contemplates any relevant disruption –, makes the album a little too conventional. Nevertheless, I must say that this record, after all, certainly is an interesting exemplar of post rock. One that might not surprise you, but definitely will make you feel delighted to a certain degree.
Wagner
The style of the group is vivaciously sensible, but also ardently oscillating. Underneath the sound, there is a mordacious, dual and consequential emptiness, whose emotional underlying vicissitudes are converted to more unexpected, but sincere forms of artistry. While the beauty is definitely overwhelmed by layers of dramatic effervescence, the melodies rotate over an axis of impulsive tension, which is something deliberately propelled by its slow acerbically rhythmic dissonances, that always advances discreetly through the surface of the melodies. So, while superficially we have a calmer disposition of sound, the inherent structure of the music is being condensed to liquefy into a more abrasive, though stable layout. The third and fourth tracks – Índigo and Cobalto – greatly exemplify this quiet musical dynamic, whose inherent structure is subject to a flexible degree of tension, that inevitably wanders over its own imperative fugacious drift.
While the music of Sans Soleil is simple, its different layers are all competently conceived, elaborated and executed. Over the more indefinite precipice of its sensible and dilated extravaganza, calmness is an element ardently conceived beyond a consistent measure; harmonies remain vagrant in an ascendant journey, but rotating over a vivacious continuity that definitely reinvents the qualitative principle of its own peripheral autonomy. Which means that its elegant calmness reluctantly enjoys a pungent level of solidarity within the sound, but is never isolated. It has a favorable relation of symbiosis with a regressive solitude, that always anticipates its elucidative consequences in the music, as a whole.
While the harmonies are well created, and exhibit consistent features, never dismantled by its intuitive oceans of serenity, Variaciones cromáticas del Atlántico is a good album with a great beginning, but a declining conclusion. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of the album becomes too uniform towards the end, and its excessive musical stability – that never contemplates any relevant disruption –, makes the album a little too conventional. Nevertheless, I must say that this record, after all, certainly is an interesting exemplar of post rock. One that might not surprise you, but definitely will make you feel delighted to a certain degree.
Wagner
