“Cracks in the Air breathes of these fascinating figures of ambient music which drinks of Steve Roach's meditative spheres”
1 No Place to Stay 6:36
2 One Existence 4:38
3 Overtime 4:42
4 Fatum 4:20
5 The Structure of Illusion 4:28
6 Paranoid Voice 8:34
7 Memory Dismantled 8:58
8 Cracks in the Air 3:08
9 Aevum 8:50
10 Ultimate Nature of Mirage 5:34
Independent
(CD/DDL 59:48) (V.F.)
(Deep and dark ambient music)
Slow synth layers spread their passive wings of which the contrasting tones float such as the breezes from an oasis of melancholy. No Place to Stay is the entering door from Javi Canovas' 14th album; a quiet album, the den of contemplativity. After an album bubbling of tribal rhythms, released earlier this year, Javi Canovas comes back to present us a much more peaceful album. CRACKS IN THE AIR, a title which depicts with poetry all its musical structure, joins the somber meditative reflections that we found on Behind the Shadows in 2010. Crafted around 10 titles which vary between 3 and 10 minutes, the Spanish synthesist walks on Steve Roach's hollow territories, One Existence, and sounds its chloroformed horizons, Overtime with an enigmatic album where the ambient music is tint of a restful musicality.
Fatum embraces a somber aura of mystery with its sibylline breaths which grumble between the sinuous spaces of monoliths and raise sonic particles so much bitter as the sands from the deserts of rocks. We comfortably sit in Steve Roach's Australian territories, percussions less, with an album filled with dark winds. Winds witnesses of a faded civilization while that The Structure of illusion illuminates a little the musicality with fine chords of an acoustic guitar which commune with themselves in melodious winds. Dreamer, Paranoid Voice lies down its somber strata filled of nostalgia in the soft winds of voices which sound like the worn breaths coming out of those Vuvuzela. Memory Dismantled adopts a little the abstruse ambiences of Paranoid Voice by spreading a sonic shroud where the veiled singings of magnetic resonances bring us towards another level of mystification. The synth lines with delicate breaths of oracles rest on these darker strata, they are even more lugubrious, showing this surprising parallel between the blackness and the brightness which crosses the 56 minutes of CRACKS IN THE AIR. I say 56 minutes because the title-track offers a bouquet of sequences which dance calmly on an attractive ambient structure. This is a great based sequences track which shows all the rhythmic prose of Javi Canovas. After this fleeting rhythmic interlude Aevum plunges us back into the morphic sweetnesses which filled the airs of Steve Roach's Structures from Silence. It's a very good ambient title which completes marvellously the too short Overtime, while that Ultimate Nature of Mirage turns around the same torments of these wild winds which moved One Existence.
A little like in Behind the Shadows, CRACKS IN THE AIR inhales these fascinating figures of ambient music which drinks of Steve Roach's meditative spheres and even Robert Rich. It's an album of dark ambient music, even very sibylline, where a subtle duel between the tones of black and white clears a restful musicality. This is why I do love ambient music.
Sylvain Lupari (October 29th, 2013) ***½**
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