MORPHEUS MUSIC REVIEWS

Arriving as ICHILLCD036 One Dub sees the popular Interchill label expanding the broad dub section of its catalogue with this fifteen track various artists collection. The album features artists already familiar to Interchill listeners: Gaudi, Liquid Stranger, Ashtech and Pushmipulyu as well as a range of top reggae artists Macka B., Sugar Minott, Michael Rose, Luciano and Dr. Israel. The label explains that the album runs "from rootsy to experimental and from steppers to dubstep, this selection takes in the many flavours of dub". The artists gathered for One Dub are a truly international scattering highlighting the global appeal of the artform.

MORPHEUS MUSIC REVIEWS

Electro-acoustic global chillout. Hippies with gadgets is a genre mixing downtempo album apparently completely unfettered by convention, there is a sense of 'anything goes' here reminiscent of some of the more exploratory music of the early seventies. There are dub-reggae beats with electric organ, Indian tablas with bird song and liquid fx, meandering flute leads and slide guitar, deep beatless ambient electronics, forest atmospheres with digital soundscaping. Electric and bass guitars and imaginative programming flesh out most of the tracks balancing the 'live' performance elements with the artificial. Rhythmically, the first two thirds of the album frequently take a live drum approach to the percussion, very laid back and restful - that said the beats at times shift into more overtly digitally driven grooves. As the album moves closer to the end, the beats are allowed to slip away, the dreamy feeling that has been present in greater or lesser degree throughout, now welling up and infusing everything with

Hippies With Gadgets is the new album from Swiss bassist Master Margherita (Moreno Antognini) and follow-up to the 2007 release Mastura. Master Margherita is well known to downtempo fans for his work as manager at Peak Records and membership of the Peaking Goddess Collective. The label well describes the new music as having a “free-thinking” composition style; what else would you expect from an artist whose musical interests and experiences are so diverse: from reggae to ambient through world beat and psychedelia. But don't get the idea that this is a disjointed slapping together of musical collage items, no; Hippies With Gadgets is well structured and strongly coherent. The eleven tracks flow together in colourful, chilled unity. If you'd like to listen to the album - there are some samples at the Arabesque website.

MORPHEUS MUSIC REVIEWS

Gold Flowers Bloom Mercury Petals is an immersive collection of a dozen pieces that form a fluid whole with faint hints of the Far East frequently adding to the placid refinement of the album. The balance of light and darkness here has resulted in music that has an appealing meditative nature yet that avoids all of the clichés of most 'relaxation music'.

CLOUD PALE AND DREAM DIMMED
The album opener unfurls with sweeping pads and sibilant percussive clacking sounds. The pervasive drifting feel that recurs throughout much of the suite is here right from the start, shifts of intensity at times seeing the music almost disperse into nothingness. Graceful string phrases waft like summer breezes, drawn out strains of scant melody silky smooth against the echoing effects that periodically shudder into earshot.

EVENING LIGHT
A gradual morph opens the second piece, the mood similar to its forerunner yet somewhat darker; a brooding drone humming below further string phrases that swell into being and fade away with unhurried regularity, like the sunshine passing behind clouds. At just over seven minutes, this is almost the longest of the twelve tracks. The ending sees the introduction of wispy air movements that flit across the transition into ...

WATERS AND THE WILD
Voicelike pads and slightly brassy sounds interweave forming rather abstract patterns wherein the previous ebbing and flowing of wavelike melody persists. The serene, attractive nature of the foreground forms are in contrast to periodic builds of dissonance and occasional openings of dark space that form behind.

BLOOM MERCURY PETALS
A wavering tremolo effect leads into this brief two minute fifty four arrangement, an uneasy ambient bed gradually amassing beneath. In time this gathering drone mass becomes prominent, diverse threads lifting out from the current - only the flow remaining.

QUIET LANDS
An air of mystery hangs as the backdrop to Quiet Lands, brief melodic phrases of piano-like notes deep within the aural fog of the piece. The ponderous regular swaying of some of the initial passages is less obvious now - drones more constant, increasingly hypnotic.

UPON RETURN FROM DREAM
The same steady gloom from the last track continues. Emergent fluttering synthetics coming to the fore midway, echoing and spacey approaching percussion almost. Metallic and bright against the ambient shadow behind, for a while approaching cacophony, then consonant, flowing together in an intensity of movement adorned with sounds that resemble effected, muted bell-trees.

FLOWER CLEANING RAIN
Now a stronger theme forms. Expansive and broad, suggestive of open spaces and fresh air. Oriental embellishments echo and reverberate - like distant variations on traditional instrumentation - and the piece is gone, just one minute forty three ...

HYPERSIGIL
The mood runs onward into Hypersigil - the panoramic breadth of the synth sweeps shifting lazily into a section of elegant depth and low frequency classic beauty. Perhaps the most beautiful track thus far - deep string-like phrases moving like large shapes under water whilst sharper drones adorn the surface with meandering currents.

ARC LAMP
Arc Lamp opens with a brightness of higher tones like beams of aural light shining in graceful motion. These shiny strains gather in wavering, almost atonal structures over a faint continuance of the thematic forms from Hypersigil, here slightly lighter and with a growing weightlessness that leave the piece floating in the ether.

CHAOS MAGIC
The fleeting two minutes, twenty six seconds of this track remains without weight - echoing effects and sussurant noise enwrapped about a more sparse thematic thread. Something of the night inhabits this piece - the fizz and sizzle of the treble strains like distant insect communities announcing the darkness, the emptiness of the music like the emptiness of the night sky.

ROUND IN CIRCLES
Here a new melodic structure arises, chimes in ascending scales, gently stepping upward over hazy, drawn out string-drones. Refined and stately, this longest composition lasts for over eight minutes, the constantly rising chimes now and then emphasised with piano touches. As the conclusion approaches a gathering cloud mass of less harmonious texture replaces the scales. A steady amorphous zone of sound that passes across the transition into ...

AMONG THE UNLABORING STARS
The rhythmic regularity of Round In Circles is gone - now a sonic expanse opens out. This composition is strongly textural, multiple layers moving among one another, hiss and noise inseparable from undulating tonal strands. Punctuating splashes of sound reverberate periodically, keeping the piece in motion. The finale drawing near, the layers thin out and soften allowing the air itself to breathe into dominance and it's over.

MORPHEUS MUSIC REVIEWS

Serene long-form ambient performance. Mantra is a single track of fifty three minutes and twenty five seconds - luminous and tranquil. The music of mantra is a sensitive layering of minimalist melody, warm, shifting texture and wafting percussives - reminiscent of floating in tropical waters. The rich drone beds flow in idle currents, hang in liquid haze or swell from within in liquid blossomings - vaguely voice-like murmurings with glassy highlights and metallic sheen. Lustrous pads loom and drift in sparse formation through this sonic ocean hinting at melody, harmonious, minimal and subtle. This suggestion of structure is taken up by a final overlayer of meandering notes that rise and fall in graceful slow motion; chime-like, piano like, synthetic - often heavily muted, softened, dulled. For a long while the closest thing to any percussion is the occasional steely ring deep in the mix, then in time the clack and rattle of faint impacts arises for a while, muted chimes afar off, slowly, imperceptibly giving way to a lighter effervescent fizzle. In places there is a sense of descent as if dropping carelessly, deep into an endless abyss, in other places the expanse is almost galactic as if alone under the night sky but for the hiss and sparkle of crickets.

MORPHEUS MUSIC REVIEWS

Electro-acoustic worldbeat. Travel By Sound is, for the most part, an upbeat album of bright instrumentals where synthetic soundscaping techniques deeply intermesh with international beats, textures and melodies. Tabla rhythms, dumbek and Middle Eastern grooves feature strongly - sometimes alone, soft, rich hand drumming resonant and exotic - sometimes in fusion, sharper programmed beats introducing dance and dub aspects. Gamelan, oriental cymbal splashes, marimba patterns and crisp shakers add to the rhythmic content as do sequenced electronic forms. Some tracks are more ambient, the percussive content less dominant or even beatless in places - lazy meandering structures where ethnic melodies, flutes, synthetic harp-like tones and water movement interact. In places the synths take a prominent role, restful swells and washes, gutsy bass lines pulsing against the ripple of arpeggiating cycles, yet even here, international colour is maintained through choice of melody and background detail.

Travel By Sound is the third release from Gregory Kyryluk in his Open Canvas incarnation. Previous CDs Nomadic Impressions and Indumani on Waveform Records began the international journey taken up by this latest disc, now delivered via his own Harmonic Resonance Recordings. But this prolific, self taught composer/performer has a discography far wider than just his Open Canvas output - Gregory also records electronic music under the name Alpha Wave Movement and as Thought Guild with fellow player Christopher Cameron. Open Canvas is the vehicle whereby the spacey, atmospheric ventures are set aside in favour of a more earthy, acoustic approach - here the familiar digital elements are threaded with the breath of flutes, the twang and drone of wire, the thud and pad of real skin.

MORPHEUS MUSIC REVIEWS

New Life New Vision comes as the third full length release from Israel based Itay Berger under the Kukan Dub Lagan moniker. The album is released via the artist's own MikelaBella Records label which has been in operation now for the past two years delivering Electro, House, Techno and Dubstep. The current Kukan album features twelve tracks of retro inspired contemporary dub electronica which promotional material appropriately explains "hail from a rainbow of eclectic musical genres from both the traditional and experimental spectrums of sound, yet belonging to none." Truly Itay's music is distinctive and individual - no-one else makes anything that sounds quite like this - warm, exuberant and infectious.

MORPHEUS MUSIC REVIEWS

Clean, atmospheric, drifting synth music. Across For Show delivers a series of cinematic soundscapes where silky electronic strains drift like early mists across minimal sonic vistas. This album might be considered a form of melodic ambience particularly as the gentler passages unfold in simple patterns of layered threads, hazy drones and airy pads filling out the suggested space. That said, the beauty of the music mostly lies in the development of subtle themes that gradually permeate the consciousness, repeating and delicately evolving. In places discordant tones well up among the dominant serenity of shadowy harmonies, further darkening the mood. For the most part the music is beatless and frequently floatational, however, the album uncharacteristically opens with a languid programmed groove of light sibilances and distantly tribal scattered hits - all subsequent tracks essentially percussion free.

Rik Maclean has been recording his personal chilled ambient music under the name Mara's Torment for well over a decade now. Across For Show, was originally released as the second CD by Mara's Torment back in 1999, now on the tenth anniversary of that event the album has been re-issued through Vir Unis' well established AtmoWorks label. Available in both mp3 and CD format through AtmoWorks, promotional material explains that Across For Show was initially "produced over a two month stretch of depression-induced creativity the original recordings were pulled at the last minute before production and replaced with a more upbeat collection of work." This current delivery presents the disc the way it was meant to be heard, a dark journey through ambient spaces and secret locations.