Bola – Gnayse

edited 2 days ago

Well I do say that Bola Gnayse has been tastefully licking the hairs inside my ears for weeks now. I am currently purchasing every album of his on Vinyl! Luckily for me he is one of the few artists I truly appreciate that has every album released on Vinyl! Why don't most musicians press vinyl??? Let's talk about Gnayse:

The opener "Eluus" pulled me in quicker than it let me go. The track is intricate and melodic with a hypnotic repetition of perfectly sequenced beats and FX. I didn't realize the second track "Sirasancerre" had even started until the mood changed into somber cosmic pads and glitch beats shined off each the stars. "Heirairerr" is the kind of track you might FEEL more than hear. It's as if stuck in a space station medics lab. Depressing and un-hopeful... maybe the space station might explode, like "Effanajor", the next track, which blows up with dead air and synth beats entangled with subtle melody but continues with struggling pads until you are lifted into an ethereal after-life realm of "Opanopono". Am I alive or am I dead, the feeling you get from "Opanopono", maybe hopeful, but definitely down trodden. "Pfane pt 1 and pt 2" continue on this same melodic journey with the alien-like sounds and futuristic arpeggiations accompanied with a piano with hall reverb. It gets pretty hopeful towards the end of Pt. 2. "Vhieneray" has the bouncing sound of rubber inside a glass tube. Genius! Lots of pad work here with minor synth rhythm. "Papnwea" is nothing like the rest of the album. It has notes of trip-hop beats and a filtered vocal synth sound that hints old tones. The melody is very unnerving and uncomfortable at times. We end the album with "Effaninor", a 4 on the floor danceable track with that same deep ambient element in the background and many god-like synth lfo's hovering above. It breaks down into a symphonic piece towards the end and then blanks out until the hidden track starts. The hidden track is somber and algorithmic and finishes with a smooth taste for another Bola album.

Overall, great album. 9/10. Darrell Fitton is a master at what he does, making amazing synthetic sounds that seem to come from aliens. I love it!

Thanks
Tobin Dack

For GNAYSE, Bola's third album (fourth, if you count SHAPES), he sticks with his blend of melancholy and deepness, as "Eluus" shows immediately. It develops slowly but inexorably, with the strings adding a sense of urgency and sadness, "Sirasancerre" is blippier, but leave it to "Effanajor" to bring the sad beauty along with the chugging rhythms. Even the short "Opanopono" packs an emotional punch. "Pfane Pt. 1" carries its slow, moody melody with a more insistent beat, while "Pt. 2" ups the rhythmic ante. "Vhieneray" speeds things up some, with a more pressing pace, but "Papnwea" brings things back down with angular tones and a brief but mysterious sample. "Effaninor" ups the rhythm again to round out the album on more upbeat note, even as the track slowly fades, letting its tones linger. And one can't forget the hidden track, which really ends the album on a mysterious note. A blisteringly beautiful album.

A very dark album, Gnayse lives up to its cover art. The textures and melodies contained herein depict a shadowy, obscured world of fossilized aliens entombed in the depths of a distant planet. The only shafts of light appear to come in the form of the excellent "Vhieneray," a track that strongly recalls the best moments of Autechre circa 1997. But even there the light is fleeting, as the darkness returns permanently on the last tracks. "Effaninor," is a good track in the tradition of extended dark pieces that close his albums.

Though there aren't many standout tracks, Gnayse is a consistent work that fits well into the Bola cannon.

I wondered how the Bolaman would follow his two previous albums 'Soup' and 'Fyuti'.Each now has their distinguished place in outstanding electronica but I genuinely believed that any third album would prompt the comment 'more of the same'.Thankfully my irritating pessimism was deftly crushed upon my first listen.
This is an album which is in every sense perfectly crafted.Where the melodies of Soup and to a greater extent Fyuti have a more climaxic nature and a greater sense of finality to them,those on 'Gnayse' manage to echo a feeling of continuity,even in the absense of the listener whilst also maintaining perfectly fluid course - something which until the release of this album I feel has only truly been achieved by Boards Of Canada.It's like reaching out into time and space and grasping a small piece of existance which has its own unique and mystifying eternity.
Absolute atmospheric brilliance.Instant admission to my top five albums of all time.

After the haunting melodies in of his previous albums "Fyuti" and "Soap", "Gnayse" clears the fact that Fitton is the 2004's Dracula or something :-)
"Gnayse" is full of mechanics and strings and ghosts and shadows and machines that make it so lovely! :)

Bola's third album on the Skam imprint is probably his darkest yet. Gnayse has many of the same traits as Fyuti: crunchy beats, weird percussion, bleepy noises, dsp effects, and his trademark ambient soundscapes. The album starts off with "Eluus", the orchestral synths adding a touch of menace to create quite a mournful sounding track. "Sirasancerre" continues in a similar vein, with the swirling synths creating a hypnotic effect. Next up is "Heirairerr", which sounds much like the piano tracks from his previous album as Jello. "Effanajor" is without doubt one of Bola's best tracks ever. It starts with metallic percussion, bleeps, and blurps, as an amazingly beautiful soundscape emerges, and takes over at the end of the track. Lovely stuff. The next four tracks continue in the same style; blissful ambience and a melodic sensibility which is second to none. "Papnwea" begins with an incredibly eerie soundscape, with piano and a female vocal sample emerging in the middle of the track. The album finishes with "Effaninor", which uses the soundscape from the seed pod screen on the Skam website. A 4/4 beat is used in combination with the dsp effected percussion and bassy blurps to drive to the track towards it's conclusion, where the synths are left to hang over the last three gorgeous minutes of the track.

As was the case with Soup and Fyuti, Michael England provided the artwork for Gnayse, and it compliments the creepy nature of the music perfectly.

Unfortunately, Dennis Bourne does not make an appearance on Gnayse, and there's no track that matches the brilliance of "Pae Paoe". For me, Gnayse is not as much of a classic as Fyuti was, but the quality of this album is supreme, and makes most IDM being released at the moment sound pathetic by comparison. A definite contender for album of the year. 5/5

Gnayse is some of the most masterful Ambient music that has been released in a long time. Bola’s organic melody structure mixed with classic piano riffs and crunchy beats makes this release so much different than his previous albums. Cut from the same cloth as Fyuti, disjointed and sometimes hard to follow beats preside, but without loss of feeling. Darrell Fitton has minimized his style for Gnayse farther than ever, and wouldn’t be distinguishable if a listener has only heard Soup. If you’re looking for another track similar to Pae Paoe you won’t find it here, sorry to say. Bola’s collaboration with Dennis Bourne (?) was an impressive use of experimentation on his side but wouldn’t find its place on an album like Gnayse. Like many others I downloaded the advanced MP3s from soulseek but this shouldn’t discourage someone, now that this option has arisen, from buying an original copy of the album. I most certainly will buy one to support the artist and the label, and I suggest everyone else does too.