“Surprising, mesmerizing and puzzling are the first qualifiers that come in mind to describe this last musical odyssey of Przemysław Rudź”
1 Farewell to Tranquil Existence 12:03
2 Mystery of ALH 84001 20:28
3 Gaia's Prophetic Dream 7:24
(feat. Jarek Figura)
4 Two Days After Extinction 18:12
5 The Power of Mind
(A Tribute To Prof. Stephen Hawking) 10:22
(CD/DDL 68:31) (V.F.)
(Progressive EM, Berlin School)
Przemysław Rudź is one of the finest new artists to emerge from the EM scene since a couple of years. Strongly inspired by sci-fi and by the music of Jean-Michel Jarre, the Polish synthesist builds albums in the measure of his visions with a skilful mixture of rhythms, sound effects, samplings and atmospheres. Cased in nice artworks that depicts the ideals and visions without ambiguities, Przemysław Rudź works soak into pure energetic cosmic rock. CERULEAN LEGACY is the cry of an artist so that our descendants have the right to aspire to a better world, a world of azure where it would be good to live in it, such as the one our ancestors built.
Farewell to Tranquil Existence opens this 4th album of Mr. P. with a long and sinuous synth wave. Soon, other are following. Graver and more resounding they float and get entangled with variable tones in a long musical cortex where they waltz and float casually in search of a sequence, a rhythm lo live on. A little after the 7th minute a discreet guitar riff pops out. It rubs an abstracted rhythm behind a maelstrom of synth layers agglutinating in a cosmos filled of very JM-Jarre tones. The riff tumbles in loops, riding an electronic ambiguity where human voices are shouting of an invisible pleasure are out of tune in front of twisted and sharp synth solos which try to tear this opaque veil that is the sound barrier of Farewell to Tranquil Existence. With its rhythms and sudden outcomes Mystery of ALH 84001 is the craziest track of the album. It starts with a very eclectic intro where fine tinkled arpeggios wind and drift among very heterogeneous tones, not to say very extra–terrestrials vocalize. A fine hatched sequence emerges out of this glass magma to dance of a hesitating movement. It goes around in limpid circles and scatters the glasses ringing tones whereas a warm synth veil wraps up Mystery of ALH 84001. A thick fog settles down, imprisoning CERULEAN LEGACY's longest track into an inertia where swirls a thick cloud of morphic stratums. Another sequence pops out. This time, it cackles such as a galactic duck while a drum makes shake it tense skins with hardihood to shape a rebel and chaotic rhythmic which draws the bedazzled rhythm of Mystery of ALH 84001. Synth solos and thick layers bite this wild rhythm, it's like a cosmic free-jazz, while percussions are isolating to hammer an unexpected solo. The beatings fall with a robotics precision while a bass sequence with resonant tones encircles this solo to shape a syncopated tempo which hiccups beneath nice synth pads and cherubs' shouts lost in a notion of the time that only Przemyslaw Rudz seems to overpower. A little like Farewell to Tranquil Existence, Gaia's Prophetic Dream floats in a cosmos filled by caustic and slinky synth stratums. Notes of guitar are dawdling there. Wandering and solitary, they chatter with the chirping of quixotic birds which sing in the shade of a synth from which sclerosed layers and metallic stratums are roaring under droning pulsations.
Two Days After Extinction begins with a nice cosmic choir which goes beyond the first notes of a lonely piano. A soft intro where we feel all the gloom and the melancholy of these 2 days which follow disaster. The piano is superb. Notes are strummed with the sadness of a pianist forgotten in a night-bar where some metallic clamours can be heard. We navigate between several parallel musical worlds. I hear influences of Klaus Schulze and Johannes Schmoelling, as well as Michael Stearns and Clara Mondshine on a slow movement which smells distress, a little as in the universe of Blade Runner. And this illusion takes all its sense with languishing synth solos that tear the opaqueness of sadness beneath fine mellotron mists. At around the 5th minute spot, a heavy sequential movement shakes the apathy of funeral laments, there where voices continued to murmur their sadness in the shade metallic crows' croaks. It's a short-sequenced movement which serves as rhythmic link between Two Days After Extinction and the lively The Power of Mind. The bewildered rhythm of a jerky and stroboscopic movement gets mould to those psychotronic beatings of Mystery of ALH 84001 and to a hiccupping bass line in order to forge a wrecking rhythm where the heavy technoïd approach marine very well with a crazy free-jazz. The Power of Mind is wild and fed by the beatings of a curt and incisive drum whereas synths wave and stroll without too much instigation on an unbridled rhythm. A rhythm which quietly goes astray towards a more cosmic tangent beneath the story of a fragment of speech held by Stephen Hawking in Mars 2002. Still there, we feel the strong influence of a Jarre with synth layers that are waving and embracing sonorities from En Attendant Cousteau.
Surprising, mesmerizing and puzzling are the first qualifiers that come in mind to describe this last musical odyssey of Przemysław Rudź. CERULEAN LEGACY is an opus just like its title. A powerful album where the blue-sky tears two universes of which the parallelism is next to a kind of improbability and where the soft ambient and morphic music caresses wild and ambiguous rhythms. Navigating between the complexities and sinuous ambiences of a musical world rich in composite tones as well as in rhythms at once explosive and reserved, CERULEAN LEGACY is this kind of story to be listened to with all the attention which deserves its conception.
Sylvain Lupari (May 13th, 2011) ***¾**
Available on Generator PL
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