“One Sea is why EM exists! It’s 60 minutes of a smooth minimalism music with sonic variations and perturbations on the same theme”
1 One Sea 59:20
(CD 59:20) (V.F.)
(Progressive EM, Psy-Trance)
Ideation's last album dates back to 2009 with the surprising Adrift (Ricochet Dream RD040). Designed on an improvisational basis, ONE SEA offers us a long, minimalist seabird journey with musical variations and sonic disturbances on a recurring theme.
Like a bird slowing down its flight to land, One Sea starts on brakes, just to organize the long musical pilgrimage of an idealistic tern. Chords skip and intertwine in the shade of delicate percussions, weaving its long rhythmic course. Other chords are added, undulating in hoops which coo like endless loops on a bed of arpeggios with intersecting destinies. These hoops with abraded contours ring finely among a rich sound fauna and synth lines which draw fine earworms, humming and undulating capriciously on an oblong hypnotic structure which is constantly enriched with sounds as quirky as paint stains trees on a beautiful sunny landscape. Prouded of its chords, sequences and percussions which fatten its structure, the rhythm is fluid and progresses with finesse and subtlety under a harmonic sky threatened by slight variations. And the first one comes around the 13th minute, infusing a light breeze of freshness with layers of misty synth that cover a rhythm that has lost noticeably its velocity. The chipped hoops remain. They draw a circular rhythmic axis which is an easy prey for percussions which are docked and redirect the rhythm towards its 2nd variation. This passage is much more atmospheric with synth lines flowing in and forming an implosive maelstrom whose musical counter winds get bogged down in a spiral spinning among hoops with sharp contours. Without rhythmic sequences or percussions, this long phase of One Sea is of an ambiophonic tranquility with its innumerable synth layers with filaments of mist which wind up in a strange ode for the serenity which scattered percussions shake timidly with hesitant strikes. It's a superb passage that awakens in me the desire to listen to M'Ocean by Michael Stearns. And like a sunrise on a horizon filled with blue of a calm ocean, the rhythm of One Sea resumes its rights. Bubbling finely with an incomprehensible murmur it stands up with difficulty, stumbling in the continual musical countercurrents to finally come out forcefully around the 43rd minute. It is a brief rhythmic passage which gradually loses its strength to sink into an abyss with misty sails where only the original curly oscillations persist and sign a cadence which gradually becomes exhausted in the tears of Aeolus and the fines disturbances of a captive sea of an endless horizon.
ONE SEA is what EM exists for. It is an idea that germinated during a preparation for the Awakenings festival and which found all its musical form in the bowels of a panoply of equipment rolled in the quarter turn. It is nearly 60 minutes of music whose variations, both rhythmic and melodic, run on the same theme which seems inexhaustible. It is very beautiful and bewitching, like a long journey on the back of a bird on a sea with chime reflections. It's available online, in great audio quality!
Sylvain Lupari (09/09/12) ****½*
Available at Ideation's Bandcamp
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