Elements is an album by Spanish electronic music artist Ajnia, released recently, on September 17. With only five tracks, named after – and effectively having an atmosphere based on – the elements, as the album title suggests, being them Earth, Fire, Air, Water and Ether, in this exact order, this album is a very ingenious mixture of ambient, psyambient and psychill. With calm melodies, almost blurred and unbound by the linear opalescence of a visible horizon, the constant rhythm of these tracks flows and vibrates directly into your ears, with such a formidable layer of serenity accompanying the natural cadence of the music, that it is almost possible to feel the sound passing by the physical barriers of time itself, flowing through you, and carrying on your body throughout a gentle journey of ethereal light, that rejuvenates almost all the atoms and molecules that drives the energy of existence.
With a solid confluence of subtle rhythms that positively renovates an unusual set of characteristics that potentiate a new pattern of motivations within the music, Elements conspires to do the unthinkable, while reinstating a lucid reinterpretation of sonorous contingencies that does, in fact, a vigorous rereading of slowness in music. By capturing the essence of an atmosphere, transliterating its sensations into a figurative sonorous diagram, the fundamental structure sculpting the music is the truth behind the sensibility of its nature, stronger enough to conflagrate the wisdom by which the light beyond the fluidity of the rhythm manages to become the driving force, by overflowing the principles that dictates the rules within the harmony.
Although the album it is far from being perfect, being a little inclined to monotony sometimes, the record does manage to set other standards to ambient music, seemingly more alive, colorful, transient and sensitive on the verge of its notes. Reaching a dimension where a grounded pattern of soft sensibility allows the music to provoke the roots of its own reason, a sincere touch of happiness, solitude and reflection inspires the retractions of melodies on its own precious delimitations, expressing a profound and restless exhilaration of thought that the music itself is able to inspire.
While the record does retain its qualities, a remarkable set of nuances, and a very sagacious spirit, with a genuine convergence of coherent melodies formulating the balance of a cohesive elemental soundscape, these usual layer of consistencies also stresses some weaknesses as well, like an excessively dispersive vagueness – while it is completely comprehensible, since it is a component of the music – that can be tiresome to the listener. Nevertheless, this does not disqualify the music, neither imposes a depreciative classification for the album. Good enough to be considered a minor work of art, Elements, by Ajnia is an album that definitely lives by the highness of its merits, although acquiring the patience to subscribe to them sometimes can be quite an ordeal.
Wagner