Steve Roach & Vidna Obmana – Spirit dome / Live archive

4 reviews for Steve Roach & Vidna Obmana – Spirit dome / Live archive

1. 

   Sylvain Lupari / Guts Of Darkness – 2022-11-22

   Out of print and hard to find, Spirit Dome and Live Archive are re edited in a double-cd set by the label. An excellent initiative which gives a second chance to discover this strange collaboration between the American western synthesist with Belgian multi- instrumentalist Dirk Serries, alias Vidna Obmana. Strange collaboration? Certainly! And you have to hear this surprising Live Archive to understand to seize all the dimension of my statement. Recorded in concert during European and American tours at the end of the 90s, Live Archive is a collection of eight tracks which fit in a long musical piece to heterogeneous tones that float in the hazes of a sweet ethereal synth. A strange artistic association which forms a pure sound fantasy where infiltrates the ramparts of darkness with the musical corridors as strange as charming.

   Mystic and captivating, the music of the duet to fantastical paradoxes is tinted with a somber discord which spreads out in the meanders of aboriginal atmospheres from an unknown world which revolves under our feet. Indeed below our buried deaths. Verucchio Invocation opens on scattered percussions which flow slightly over the water, under didgeridoo heavy reverberations. Resonances multiplies at night, covered with cymbals and strange Indian incantations, furrowing a reverberating sound corridor of which echoes get lost in a long biting trail.
   From this somber serenity, we are going into the sweet celestial stratas of Common Ground, of which the intro betrayed the animated heaviness that points up with dramatic percussions to caustic rumbles thunders that sow swell among a horde a discreet synthesized streaks which shell its melodies among tribal chants. Simply superb and subjecting! Roach and Obmana use a panoply of complex instruments (this is a live re cording, if you forget), creating a sound universe so rich as both ears have difficulty to assimilate everything.
   A unique music to deafening drones that are shaping to exquisite synthesized layers which fly over a ground of slow and hypnotic percussions, as we will find on the very beautiful and heady Two Reptiles who fades out its rhythmic in the ashes of Dreampipe Dialogue, one of the two ambient passages (the other being Ascension) on Live Archive.
   Merging ambient to frank rhythms of scattered tam-tam skins, Soundworld Collage furrows a strange sound world to bumpy crashes which hold sway among flute breaths all so enchanted as spectral.
   Pulsations and deaf hammerings which drag around spit viper cymbals, or electronic crickets, Tribal Perspective goes through a musical corridor semi trance and semi hypnotic, where howlings and cawings of whimsical darkness are stuffing themselves of innocence in perdition which grows with Divine Innermissions intro and gets lost in the infernal rhythms guided by anabolic percussions which stamp ones feet cruelly under a sky streaked with a strange blazing fire.

   Live Archive is very different and more woken up than Spirit Dome; a more serene album which always exploits the suspicious meanders of an always unknown universe, but with a more poetic sweetness, stigmatizing the disturbing sound monument whom is Live Archive.It is in the room 314, on the night of May 24th, 2002 (the day before Projekt Festival in Philadelphia) that the duet Roach / Obmana improvised Spirit Dome. A musical communion in the heart of the sleepy blackness of Philadelphia, which depicts admirably well the chemistry that lights up the sound ascent of two artists to convergent artistic ideals. Divided into eight segments Spirit Dome espouses the somber crepuscular movements with a light underground lapping which gives life to Spirit Dome I‘s intro. Quiet, the movement progresses following the wisdom of its delicacy, with a soft hollow breath which waves by following the smooth walls of a subterranean grotto which blazes from the iridescent specters of rattlers and other jumping insects which glide in this fanciful universe.
   Quite slowly, the movement increases of a quiet life with the appearance of the 2nd part, where light tam-tams rake up the night-depths of a parallel life with composite tones which adapt of thick clouds of reptiles and insects to metallic rustles, with the awakening of the first synthesized stratas which get entangled lasciviously around slow processions which breathe and expire in a poetic darkness.
   The 3rd part dives back into the atonal blackness where only howling layers blow such as misled specters which wander in corridors animated of a strange heterogeneous world which survives in abysmal limbos of night-wanderings.
   And so goes Spirit Dome; a world strangely absent from where flees discreet sound spasms and percussions to dramatic processions which fall again into the forgotten night twilights, until the finale where synthesized stratas embrace the diurnal lights just before resting of this strange night owl quest.

   2009. Sylvain Lupari / Guts Of Darkness

2. 

   Glenn Hammett / The Raging Consciousness Desk – 2022-11-22

   Live Archive”.
   This live recording taken from a series of concerts given throughout Europe and the U.S. (with one studio track) surely rates as one of the finest examples of Ambient Electronics period. Imagine the very best of both artists’ collective history

3. 

   Phil Derby – 2022-11-22

   Dramatic and ominous, Verucchio Invocation” starts “Live Archive” in stirring fashion. Silent

4. 

   John Shanahan / Hypnagogue – 2022-11-22

   Spirit Dome”
   Recorded in one continuous 74-minute session