“Contemplative ambient music that flies over the colors and shades of our interpretation”
1 Watch the Clouds pass Overhead 6:20
2 Open Space 4:00
3 The Sense of Peace and Tranquility 6:40
4 Reconnect with Nature 6:13
5 Natural Landscape 4:26
6 Walking through the Fields 7:20
7 A Place of Childhood Memories 6:59
8 Sleeping under the Stars 6:24
(DDL 48:24) (V.F.)
(Ambient Music)
The great green spaces where the horizon marries its color to the blue of the sky. These fields where birds play tag and bees buzz with the nectar of their symphony. These spaces where the tranquility makes us forget the skyscrapers that pierce the purity of this azure blue. Here is the cradle of this other atmospheric work that Romerium soberly titles GREENFIELDS. Offered in download format only, this latest sonic Picasso from the musician-synthesist from The Hague in the Netherlands is another ode to tranquility in the same meditative colors as Mysterious Fog, and this even if its vision should be more ethereal. Rene Montfoort offers here a collection of tracks where the music of contemplative ambiences flies over the colors and shades of our interpretation.
In an opening that reminds me that I'll have to listen to Mike Oldfield's Hergest Ridge again soon, the synth wave that cuts through the introduction to Watch the Clouds pass Overhead is like a scarlet blade. The wave vibrates with a trickle of Lilliputian voices and a dew of drones, creating an orchestral backwash that can be heard throughout the 8 atmospheric paintings of GRENNFIELDS. Moreover, the effect of its color is tempered by the texture of the violin breezes that lead to a swarm of chirps, sounding like organic chimes, and their seraphic tunes and impulses. The opening of Open Space is a bit on the same intonation. It is also sadder. More melancholy with synth waves filled of sorrow which are drifting while giving low bow. The tonal colors of the waves migrates to a fluty essence, preserving that envelope of longing that fills our senses. In this ode to contemplativeness of GREENFIELDS' green spaces, the majority of the openings have this gift of assail our meditative state. Like that of The Sense of Peace and Tranquility which, despite the lyrical range of its title, offers a heavy music. It is an intense track with a listless slowness that is rendered by a heaping wave of drones and woosshh that roll in a firmament dominated by a tenebrous vision. Half-human, one can barely discern an absent choir, and half-industrial rustles add a texture that is as sibylline as seductive to music that seems to run counter to its title. It's much the same with Reconnect with Nature and its opening animated by waves of rustling synths whose fine industrial texture cannot be ignored as it emerges from the mass of sounds. Little by little, the ambiences are coated with a philharmonic texture that does not cover all these unusual noises of a nature torn between the industrial perception and the serenity of its vast fields of high grass.
A big lament from a drone is at the origin of the very seraphic Natural Landscape. The fusion of light and shadow drifts with layers of celestial voices and sighing orchestrations. There is a delicate texture of transcendental meditation in this soft astral quietude that reminds me a lot of Ray Lynch in The Sky of Mind. Walking through the Fields is in the same sense. It is a quiet track with synth waves that multiply in a restricted space where various Tibetan-flavored knocks tinkle and soberly answer to their echoes in this dense membrane of drones and orchestrations. A Place of Childhood Memories is a track built on 2 contrasts. Its waves of reverberations that come and go, like lapping waves of sound, and its soft dreamy orchestrations merge in a static ballet where electronic effects sometimes slip in, like hummingbird airs, and more dramatic synth sighs, especially towards the finale. The opening of Sleeping under the Stars features dark, resonant shadows that undulate and drift in arabesques of sound that perpetuate like half circles of reverberation. It is here that we hear the only percussive elements of GREENFIELDS with sparse beats that do not structure any form of rhythm. The synthesizer lets waves go by where drones, orchestrations and delicate fluty filaments are attached in order to create a musical texture as lyrical as it is sibylline. Texture rather present on the 8 musical paintings of an album conceived to meditate the spirit as free as the green grasses of the meadows whipped by hot winds.
Sylvain Lupari (May 22nd, 2023) ***½**
Available at Romerium Bandcamp
(NB: The texts in blue are links you can click on)
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