Craig Padilla & Skip Murphy – Analog destination

4 reviews for Craig Padilla & Skip Murphy – Analog destination

1. 

   Artemi Pugachov / Encyclopedia for Electronic Music – 2022-11-22

   Excellent dark synth soundscapes herald the coming of the title track and we are drifting in space for a few minutes. Wonderful symphonic synths are rich in color and texture. A sequence can be heard, gradually gaining in volume. Another sequence appears and then in comes a rippling analog solo. A wonderful rhythm starts, as a new solo and echoing sequencers are combined to wonderful effect. This is quite simply some of the best EM I’ve heard! It’s so warm and floating and yet so cosmic, it’s uncanny! After the 10-minute mark the rhythm departs but the electronic pulsations continue casting their spell. This track is monumental; it has everything that’s so great about EM. You will hear so many different sounds here, so many atmospheres, that you won’t notice how these 18 minutes fly by.

   Stellar Nursery” begins with strange ring-modulated sounds

2. 

   Dene Bebbington / Melliflua – 2022-11-22

   The latest collaboration of Craig Padilla and Skip Murphy is aptly titled because they predominantly use analogue synthesisers on Analog Destination. All four tracks are live recordings, three of which were recorded live in a studio. Looking at the extensive equipment list in the liner notes it seems that the artists used every synthesiser they could lay their hands on!

   Bold and mysterious spacey sounds swirling around the soundscape begin the title track Analog Destination” before an obligatory chugging sequence starts up. This builds up in excitement with the addition of drum effects and zigzagging whistles and continues in this vein before slowing off for a restrained end.
   Among all the spaceyness the best is on the longest track “Stellar Nursery” coming in at over twenty eight minutes long. Spiralling ripples and stardust pads take the listener on a mental journey through a mass of stellar activity and birth. Brief heavenly chorale sounds are heard before a beepy sequence and ticking

3. 

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

   Recorded live, as much as in studio for tracks 1-2 and 4, this 4th Padilla Murphy collaboration brings us into a musical experience where improvisation mixes perfectly to their creative chemistry. A musical delight which transcends the meanders boundaries of EM, as space rock and prog rock.

   Dark and wandering waves, tinted of a galactic zest, are blend to heavy and threatening reverberations in the opening of Analog Destination. A good slow intro which floats on morphic and poetic synths. Quietly, Padilla Murphy sprinkles us with great synth layer loops that breathe in an ambiguous sound horizon where heavy and neurotic sequences reign among frenzied percussions. Synth breathes and music impregnates the air of hooking charming serenade that arent necessarily appeasing. Wonderful musical contrast on great harmonies.
   Great aggressive music by Padilla Murphy which continues to astonishes with the beautiful spacey Stellar Nursery. A Schulze intro (Body Love area) that vanishes in a relaxing cosmos. A cosmos covered by a superb fluty Mellotron whose celestial voices lull the deepest of the space, our subconscious, until its awakening by a looping sequencer rolling into a suave and languorous galactic tango that moves towards amazing analog sounds effects, recalling Jarre period of Oxygene and Equinox. A great track which revolves constantly between two tempos, space rock and floating music, aromatized by great Mellotron moods and variegated rhythms, full of nostalgic ASE (Analog Sounds Effects).
   Recorded in concert, Live Illusions, from the Phantasma album, fits with wonder to the frame of this very space and prog rock universe which girdles all along Analog Destination.
   Respecting the floating introductory structures of Analog Destination, Quantum Swirl opens with a beautiful waltzing flute in a dense cosmos. Far away, a hypnotic sequence circles around a synth to harmonious pads, plunging us in the heart of Schulze analog years. Smooth Mellotron, growing hypnotic tempo and melodious synth, Quantum Swirl explodes into a heavy and frantic structure, guided by sequences with aggressive loops and wild synth solos. A superb passage worthy of the best metallic Tangerine Dream sequences, which dies out in the braised breaths of its opening.

   Analog Destination is a diversified opus which oscillates with ease between space rock as well as progressive rock in a great Berlin School Californian School EM atmospheres and structures. A big grabber and a must for the 2008 year.
   An opus that I’m still listening with the pleasure of its first listen.

   2008. Sylvain Lupari / Guts Of Darkness

4. 

   Matt Howarth / Sonic Curiosity – 2022-11-22

   This release from 2008 offers 76 minutes of lush electronic tuneage. Three of the tracks were recorded live at Dancing Astronaut Studio throughout 2007, while the fourth piece, recorded at the Sundial Bridge in California on August 23, 2007, is a live version of a song from their Phantasma” album.

   The first track embodies a compression of airy electronic layers which achieve a ponderous density as they coexist. Lavish sequences are utilized as backdrops for more demonstrative passages