“Elusive Metaphor is an album with strange poetic aromas where dark ambient music always roams in strange corridors”
1 Unspoken Shapes 11:44 2 The Dispersed Expectance 9:35 3 Wordless Arcanum 4:27 4 Dissolved Heaven 10:10 5 Fragile Imagery 6:04 6 Where We Are Not 4:17 7 Roundabout Mirages 6:00 Alio Die Bandcamp
(CD/DDL 53:04) (V.F.) (Dark ambient EM)
It's with the music of Bakis Sirros that I began to appreciate the very dark ambient music style. Why? Because the Greek musician is very intelligent. He transcends the genre by adding sonic particles such as organic breaths, insect chants and industrial noises which make nuances and contrasts in a musical decoration where the anxiety, the paranoia is hiding in the slightest beatings. ELUSIVE METAPHOR is the second collaboration between Alio Die and Parallel Worlds. And contrary to the somber structures of Circo Divino, the enigmatic tandem of ambient metallurgical offers an album to the strange poetic aromas where dark ambient music always roams in corridors filled by unusual noises, but also in beautiful soundscapes a bit more ethereal with discreet tempos which are modulated in the shadows of the ambiences.
Winds sing with all their apocalyptic color at the opening of Unspoken Shapes. Vocal drones, murmurs and rustles invite these winds to take other tints while the first beatings get scatter in a structure of ambient rhythm in transformation. The evolution is slow and is decorated with a crowd of organic noises, covering our eardrums of an immense ambiosonic shroud. The details make the difference. The voice of India Czajkowska arises from the darkness, blunting the ambiences which suddenly free a delicate spectral rhythm. We are in the lands of Circo Divino with this ambient rhythm which pounds of its muffled pulsations and which radiates of its crystal-clear arpeggios of which the ringings make contrast with the somber twisted drones and the very ethereal chants of India Czajkowska. The metamorphosis goes on while the rhythm of Unspoken Shapes amazes with an unsuspected vigor. The ringings shine like knocks on a glass anvil and the fluid flow which rolls let us think of the bones of a crawling creature which tumbles down tops to break its bones. The whole thing makes counterweights to those laconic pulsations and the somber moods which maintain Unspoken Shapes in its element of dark and of introspective psybient. The term of psybient lends itself completely to this last work of the duet Alio Die and Parallel Worlds where the soft rhythms are gobbled up in an intense ambiosonic flora. The Dispersed Expectance presents also a long ambient intro with the somber shadows of a modular synth which float on the rustles and on the chirpings of an organic, sometimes animal and often electronic, fauna. These elements merge their disturbing charms while some of them escape in order to forge an abstract rhythm. A rhythm that we guess, and which little by little settles down with pulsations of which the symmetric debit is of use as bed to a surprising eclectic flora of which the symbiosis of the elements in place eventually forged a strange hallucinogenic hymn. Except that The Dispersed Expectance has something else to offer! A hallucinating finale where the shadows of the pulsations take another tint and are draining like in a tapped dropper, while that the noisy swarm of multi-sonic shades swallows this rhythm into a delicious ambient din. Wordless Arcanum stands out a bit from the first two structures by offering livelier tempo. One would say some kind of organic suction cups which try to eat avidly so much the beatings are dynamic, starved. Fast and always unsatiated, these beatings are also stormy as the sonic fauna which harass them. Strange and fascinating, this track finds its attraction in its evanescent envelope.
We don't dream when our ears meet the chirpings of the birds which charm the opening of Dissolved Heaven whose reminiscences of Circo Divino's title-track titillate our ears. The lines of synth, even the drones of Alio Die, are translucent and we can even hear solitary guitar chords irradiating a comforting ambient heat. Knocks of clogs draw the solitary hike of a cowboy in a plain where a mass of tones as organic as heterogeneous are in symbiosis with the colors of a sonic sky of which the scarlet radiations shake the dangling of big bells. I have for the vague feeling to hear Erik Wollo in a darker environment. Fragile Imagery is a beautiful ambient track, decorated with organic jingles, which is very near Steve Roach's meditative territories with beautiful synth lines which drop some nice filet of spectral voices, whereas Where We Are Not is a pleasant down-tempo builds around some muffled pulsations which pound in a glaucous industrial universe. Roundabout Mirages ends this second collaboration Alio Die and Parallel Worlds with an ambient and dark structure where the quaver of the riffs and of the sonic hoops draw a delicate rhythm finely jerky. An ambient rhythm which spreads its jerks in an attractive organic universe where the ceaseless chatters of the insects irradiate moments of anxiety that lines of synth, very musical, still lock into a universe filled of Steve Roach's perfumes.
In spite of a sonic fauna filled with of thousand wealth, the world of Parallel Worlds always remains so closed, so hard to get in. Released only in an edition of 300 factory pressed CD's, the Gothic meditative approach of ELUSIVE METAPHOR breathes the seduction, even if resolutely it goes for a restricted audience. Alio Die and Parallel Worlds have succeeded this bet of not repeating themselves in a genre which offers few possibilities of avoiding the redundancy, unless being daring. Of transcending the borders which bound fright of the poetry. And it is all the charm of ELUSIVE METAPHOR. The duet does well marvelously in combining both extremes in order to sculpture the paths of a territory which has still so much to offer. It's beautiful and absolutely mesmerizing. Well done, it flows great between both our ears and our four walls.
Sylvain Lupari (February 21st, 2015) *****
Available at Alio Die & Parallel Worlds Bandcamp
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