Colourform - Visions Of Surya

Another beautiful piece of work from Matt Hillier himself and passed away legend Jake Stephenson…

Jake Stephenson was known for a great deal of electronic music projects, mainly of acid "303" and ambient nature. The biggest contribution he made was, most definitely, to Kinetix label, mainly with projects Optica and Optic Eye – two similar acts I'm a big fan of, both collaborated with another producer, Brian Trower.

Colourform, however, is not the first collaboration between Jake and Matt, apparently, two good friends in the past. Story started off more than ten years ago with establishment of acid-ish ambient project Crystal Moon, which I personally reckon ended up to be quite overshadowed and pretty unseen, not receiving big exposure, even though I consider it to be pretty much worthwhile project.

Taking into account the style adopted in Crystal Moon, one could expect to hear something similar, but will be very pleasantly surprised to meet another, very calm, minimalistic and free of "acid" higher-level sound.

Perhaps, this has to be my absolute favourite project from all so for not very big Virtual family; and maybe even further... As a side note, I've had a big respect for Jake Stephenson (RIP), so having this CD in my collection is somewhat of a honour.

Although any review is always an utterly subjective thing, I'd have to say that this is definitely superior than Ishq and Elve. If you like calm, meditative-oriented, 'celestial' ambient work, you'd most probably make an unexcusable mistake having missed this outstanding release.

10/10.