“This one is an interplanetary adventure designed to bring us into a state of relaxation”
1 Nebula Radiance 12:17
2 Pole Star 10:30
3 Dusk on Altair 4:40
4 Timeless Starfields 11:45
5 Tone Poem for the Pleiades 5:23
6 Celestial Sail 9:00
(CD-r/DDL 53:38) (V.F.)
(Sequenced Beats - Ambient Music)
It's following a buzzing sound that gradually turns into celestial messages that Nebula Radiance carves out a place between our ears. This floating momentum makes move its sonic wings that turn into orchestral layers where the sighing of violins make these strings of a barely distinguishable harp tinkling. The tonality becomes a scarlet chant where these claws try to slow down the descent of this layer whose sound aspect constantly modifies its identity. Especially that a delicate movement is structured with the ascent of arpeggios in a movement of ambient rhythm, like a Berlin School. The musical panorama is of glass with points that rub, making this crystal howl whose metallic blue universe throws a coldness heard. And then comes the 5th minute where the landscape metamorphoses to become dark and cosmic with a drone veil whose implosions dance under the stars with this ascending rhythm. The 3rd transformation of Nebula Radiance brings a starry universe by the twinkling of the sound antics in a cosmos dressed of these orchestrations that bring the listener to appeasement. The ambient rhythm changes of skin for that of the implosions whose swirls need this return in force of the first sketch of rhythm, bringing the title in a final of celestial ambiances. How good it is to hear Alpha Wave Movement again! Not that Gregory T. Kyryluk's adventure in Biome and the Essence album was not conclusive. On the contrary! Except that with AWM, we know what to expect. INFINITE REALMS is an interplanetary adventure designed to bring us into a state of relaxation. The music criss-crosses the celestial source of hertzian waves and cosmic cloud zones as it did over 25 years ago with the album The Edge of Infinity. An era I still haven't met, by the way. And as usual, the music travels between its extremes taking a jealous care to fix its moorings of cosmic melodies all over the place to feed a finale that always meets our expectations.
Darker, even cathedral-like, Pole Star offers a dark journey into absolute darkness. The humming line modifies its sound range with drops in intensity and in the sound axes, leaving shimmering and even dancing filaments on its carapace. Imagine the movement of a whale and its herd of fish eating its waste. The buzzing breaths bring a rhythmic embryo that timidly makes its presence heard after the 5th minute. This new ascension of the sequencer is an object of concentration of our ears for a big 60 seconds, where jolts of bass-pulses whirr while extending a more musical aura to the meditative soundscape of Pole Star. The vocals that stick with it inject a nice emotional intensity into what becomes a very good moment in this album. Dusk on Altair is a short track that bickers between its different textures and personalities. Imagine a tube with a hole bigger than the outlet, fill it with every possible range of sounds and squeeze with all your strength to get the sound out and it gives Dusk on Altair and its slight jerking effect. Timeless Starfields' drones are gentle arcs of sound that unwind to curl into an ambient choreography where the sounds dance with our imagination. It's a beautiful moment of meditative ambience that reaches a point of darkness after the 3rd minute. Darker, the drones remain musical as they are attached to a celestial choir whose soft whispers come and go momentarily only to re-emerge just before the Timeless Starfields setting sinks into an unrecoverable darkness. The music follows its route with its mutations between the celestial aspect and the other more sibylline which will make the charms of a second half sculpted to border me until sleep. Tone Poem for the Pleiades falls like a curtain of sounds waves that multiply the caresses in an intense energetic luminance. Celestial voices like stardust form and dissolve with radiant fizzes as muffled pulses beat a dying rhythm. An impressive moment of intensity that has the makings of an astral symphony. And we arrive at Celestial Sail! In fact, we could feel this track coming because of the many orientations of INFINITE REALMS and its bits of ambient melodic rhythms left here and there. The light beat attracts an anaesthetizing layer and its scents of desert dunes. The Steve Roach effect comes to sit with the conception of Celestial Sail. A bit elastic, the rhythm rises and falls, sticking an extra pulse until it creates a slow static gallop. The synth breezes trail the colors of a campfire fading into the night, until the 5-minute point where guitar and synth each weave their melodious tunes into a sky that lights up with so much creativity as Celestial Sail slowly moves into this oasis of the most beautiful tracks in the field of ambient EM. A wonderful track that concludes another good sonic rendezvous with the music of Alpha Wave Movement. But are we surprised?
Sylvain Lupari (August 23rd ,2021) ****¼*
Available at HRR Bandcamp
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