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Buyer Rating: 100.0% positive (7 ratings)

Abasio's groups (2)

• Ambient and Experimental
• Goa / Psy-Trance

Principles Of Flight - Chaos Opera - 07-May-09 07:27 PM
It has been a while since I was first amazed by Principles of Flight when they released their debut album Night Time Lullabies back in December of 2006. Nearly 2 and half years later Pierre Delort & Remy Maurin are back with their follow up album Chaos Opera. When the debut is so good the second album can always be tricky. Stay with the same sound then people will call you boring, repetitive & lacking in ideas. Stray too far from your original sound and the people who loved your first album may easily hate your second. Successful artists in this reviewer’s humble opinion manage to keep the atmosphere of their first album but build on it with fresh ideas and more experience technically leading to better production. I believe that Principles of Flight have succeeded very well indeed. Chaos Opera has managed to keep everything I loved about the first album, the concept, the story telling feeling, the mix of up-tempo tracks and downtempo intermissions, the energy & the mix of beats are great. It has also managed though to build on Night Time Lullabies, the production seems cleaner, the fullon baselines while still integral, and fit so well that at times you’ll never notice them; none of them are dominant like many of the high tempo Psytrance that is released nowadays. The psychedelic level I believe has been raised as well if you are crazy chaotic sounds that sound like little monsters hiding just behind that tree then you’ll agree with me that the trippiness here is fantastic. At times I get the feeling that I am listening to a movie soundtrack, with the orchestral feel there & the progression of each track & of the album as a whole I can picture the story in my head.

I listened to the album a few times before I read the story in the booklet to see what story my head created before my feeling was distorted by someone else’s words. I imagined dark lands full of dense forests, small towns and morose inns. I imagined traveling through this land with strange creatures lurking in the forest and in the bars, eyes on me all the time. I imagined a journey to find something lost, a journey with stranger creatures becoming more common and forbidden enjoyment working its way out. When I did finally read the story in the booklet I was surprised to see that although there were more details (and of course characters) the story felt like I had imagined, a sign I think of music well made around Pierre and Remy’s concept.

The start of the story for me describes the atmosphere of the album very well. It is dark yet innocent, classical yet contemporary, mature yet it has a youthful glow. I am really enjoying the sounds used here and the number of layers. I notice new things on every listen, something I often find with ambient albums but much less often with trance albums. Someone once asked me for recommendations for trance with dark ambient atmospheres. At the time my mind went blank as I tried desperately to think of this album. Really this is the best description I can think of, great high energy trance music with dark ambient atmospheres. The best thing is that they probably never had that in mind and it has evolved naturally with better results than I could have imagined.

I really can’t recommend this enough. Any fans of Principles Of Flight – Night Time Lullabies should really enjoy this, as I said above it is a brilliant follow up, not to similar to the debut with fresh ideas & cool new concepts but it still has that POF air about it that will have made you fall in love with Night Time Lullabies. If you have never heard Night Time Lullabies but you like conceptual Psytrance albums with a dark edge (I have called this dark a few times but it is so far away from what is known as dark psy) and a hell of a lot of psychedelic goings on then you would do well to get this & Night Time Lullabies at the same time. Listen to the debut first as this album is even better.

As an album it is amazing as you really must listen to it as a whole to get the whole thing but even on such great albums there are standout tracks. If the first 10 tracks are amazing then The Chase is out of this world, mind blowingly orgasmic stuff! Combined with A Colourful End it feels like one long track which twists and turns throughout. For a track that starts out energetic it is amazing how it manages to build in energy throughout, the sort of paradoxical building that seems to build and build yet stay the same all the way. There are tracks that no matter where you are when you listen to them you have to pull that stupid “I’m loving this face” and do some weird dancing either head bobbing or something with your hands. The embarrassment of looking like a weirdo at the station is far outweighed by my enjoyment of this track. Dance like there is nobody watching no matter where you are. In A Colourful End the beats change into a drum & bass style and satisfies my hunger for a genre I love but which I feel always sounds the same. These I do believe will be the best tracks I hear this year. Of course I’d love to be proven wrong but it will take something really special to beat these 10/10 tracks. There could have been no better way to finish an album than this. My pattern so far has been to repeat these tracks then start the whole album again.

Atrium Carceri - Seishinbyouin - 11-Apr-09 09:05 AM
Atrium Carceris second album is even better than the first. The theme this time is in an Insane Asylum (Seishinbyouin literally means mental hospital) and it is the sort of music than could send you there. The horror this time is a whole different brand. Whereas the first album created a feeling of fear based on your loneliness amongst the hellish ghosts in the abandoned prison, this album clearly focuses on the recesses of your mind. The voices that whisper to you & the demons that lurk with your soul. There are Japanese voices throughout that must feel like a schizophrenic part of your own personality that you cant quite understand.

The dark voice in In Chaos Eternal starts us on that journey as it feels like a dark voice from within telling me evil things beyond my comprehension. That feeling is continued in Illusion Breaks which also has a creepy dripping sound like a dank dark cell. The Piano in Hidden Crimes adds a really human touch, the melody is in itself quite pleasant but when mixed with the cold wind & the dark voices it just sounds spooky. The harshness of Incubation is right from the sample to the groaning sounds of a machine brain to the orchestral strings that while smooth really cut a harsh picture in my mind. Twisted Foetus just makes me want to scream out, the slight melody on some slight string permeates through harsh groaning drones, whispers of evil power & the dark underlying pain of self awareness. The power of Warden is huge. Its the most driven and rhythmical track has harsh synths that seem to cut through the brain like a scythe chopping the dead wood off. The low piano keys in Dark Water are as ominous as the scuttling sounds are creepy. The choir pick up after those are banished but it only adds to the feeling of unease. Atmosfear I guess tries to create a scary atmosphere but ends up a little too cluttered & while still very atmospheric, it doesnt sound as scary as the rest until the latter half where the orchestral strings come in creepy as hell. The feeling of isolation in Isolation is overpowered by the feeling that something unknown & unseen is lurking beneath the surface of your thoughts while Victim has a conversation in Japanese between the first meeting between a psychiatric nurse & a patient in the hospital, due to the conversation Im left unsure as to who is or who will be the victim. Librarian has the first English in it Dont Be Scared which of course has the opposite effect than what you assume is the desired result from the words especially as the screaming starts, not as someone in pain but as someone in complete turmoil & mental anguish. After that brief hope we descend into more despair with The Call a female patient cries out to a male patient unbelieving of her fate and needing reassurance. What she gets though are cold hard truths of what is happening, apologetically. Escape has the dark feeling of underground sewers but still with creepy inner voices & Frosted Snowflakes saves the best for last, the trippiest conversation promising that things are alright when they are quite obviously not. The pulsating bass rhythm & the chimes sounding exciting my own personal fear that I will die among the sound of silent bells.

What this has over Cellblock is flow, there is much more between each track creating a more hypnotic feeling & you feel more immersed in the nightmare. This is definitely top notch 10/10 dark ambient. If you want to have nightmares then play this before you go to bed. I did & I had the most amazingly dark twisted dreams. Try it!

Atrium Carceri - Cellblock - 11-Apr-09 09:04 AM
This is one creepy ambient album. The theme is a prison and it must be some kind of hellish prison out of the best kind of horror movies. The whole album feels like it has been made for a horror movie & Im sure that if they made the movie with this as the sound track it would be one scary film. Throughout the album there are dark voices, some sound human some do not. There are creaking doors, dripping walls and piano that sounds so creepy in that it is both out of place and the most in place thing. Of course as youd expect there are a lot of drones, all dark, all horror, but not drawn out like a lot of drone work is.

The sound of a gun being cocked in Black Lace as a sense of danger from a regular source while the static rushes in Machine Elves add a sense of danger from something much more paranormal & malign. The chaos of Blue Moon subsides halfway through leading into an unexpected pulsating rhythm and descending back into chaos really sounds like this story is set in cellblock Hell. The deep throbbing bass on Depth rattles the inside of my brain. The Japanese sample in Crusted Neon is creepy in that it is so human yet so alien. The beat that comes in is so throbbing that it vibrates my living room floor. Halls of Steam is very descriptive in that it sounds like a corridor with pipes rattling & venting more than just steam. The creaking in this track sounds at times like a demonic laugh. Reborn has footsteps slowly edging forwards and what sounds like hellish cries in extreme pain. The machine like sounds in Red Stains is like some dark underground forge in some dark land and finally Inner Carceri feels like the culmination it should be, more relaxed than most of the other tracks but just as scary. The choir like voices mixed with scratching sounds like small hellish creatures make a "the horrors passed but only because youre dead" feeling.

Scary, hellish, horror, demonic, human, suffering, pain, dark, creepy, all of these are great adjectives to describe Cellblock. It is a fine dark ambient album but it could have been better. It could have been a nine or ten out of ten album but falls short only on its lack of flow. Each track is very separate from the preceding & following track. The atmosphere stops before it comes back in & this slightly disjointed feeling spoils the flow for me. Still that is a small gripe & Id highly recommend this album to any dark ambient lover, it avoids cliches & just concentrates on being dark, therefore it becomes scarier than if he was trying to be scary.

Ambientium - Fractal Philosophy - 11-Apr-09 09:03 AM
Ambientium are Lucie and Lubos hailing from the Czech Republic. This is the first and only release I am aware of and it is a free net release available from Ambientium dot com and Kahvi dot org. This is a release that shows just how good a lot of the free net releases can be. This sounds spacey and deep with a lot little psychedelic sounds, nice melodies and sci-fi imagery. This sounds a little like Distant System – Spiral Empire and could have appeared on Ultimae Records. The production is not quite up to the standard of the aforementioned musicians though and it would be nice to hear this remastered and have a few things tweaked. Occasionally the intro of a track doesn’t flow well into the rest of it and sometime the changes in direction are a little abrupt but overall I am very impressed by this album. It has what is more important to me than production, it has ideas and great ideas at that. This is a very visual album and while listening to it I am taken on a journey through outer space, passed dust clouds onto alien planets, being abducted by aliens & floating down along the length of a huge spaceship.
This album also has a lot of different styles mixed in together, there is a lot that sounds deep and bassy like many Ultimae albums, there is also a lot of melodic tracks with even some glitchy ones, ambient ones, natural sounds and mechanical sounds and even one track that is a little bit on the cheesy side. Despite all these styles though this is best listened to as a whole as it’s a good journey better on headphones without any distractions.

Abakus - We Share The Same Dreams - 11-Apr-09 09:00 AM
Abakus debut album That Much Closer To The Sun was in my opinion the greatest summer album ever made. It was summer in a can, that you could just put into your CD player and it would warm you up no matter how cold. The follow up to such a great album was always going to be difficult and I almost didnt get it when I heard people talking about it as too clubby and not chilled anough. I wanted to see for myself though & I am glad I did, it is very nice follow up album, its very summery and for the most part pretty chilled.

I am very happy to have gotten this album. It is a great summer CD and I know that come May I will be playing this a lot. Even now in January when I listen to it it feels like it is summer already. Dont be put off by people talking about this album as if it is some clubby nightmare from Ibiza. Only 2 tracks even come to close to that description and they are not that bad, just a bit dull or out of place. The rest are beautifully chilled out summery tracks that Im sure most people who enjoyed the first album would enjoy. Expect it to be a little more upbeat, not quite as amazing but still like summer in a bowl.

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