Fryderyk Jona – Electronic ballad

1 review for Fryderyk Jona – Electronic ballad

1. 

   Sylvain Lupari / gutsofdarkness.com & synthsequences.blogspot.ca – 2022-11-22

   The sound which goes out is the one of a saxophone. The ears riveted to the headphone, we even hear the breaths of the saxophonist. When Ron Boots speaks, EM fans have generally the attentive ears. When he mentions that Electronic Ballad is an album to be listened to, that Fryderyk Jona is an artist to discover, the curiosity is fast spurred. And I start searching. I received the music of this Polish synthesist who lives now in Germany and of which the style is influenced by an ambient and a melancholic Berlin School. The presentation is very well made with a beautiful artwork, the album is only offered in a CD digipack version for the moment, of an astral blue which encircles an image of the cosmos. And the first sound which goes out is the one of a saxophone. At the beginning, we are not certain. It sounds like Klaus Schulze’s In Blue. Remember this synth perfumed of a saxophonist’s harmonies. It’s the first impression that comes to us. And afterward? We fall in the delight!

   A slow and wide synth line comes to give more luster to this saxophone, plunging the long eponym track into an ambient serenade where the synth subdivides its songs with clouds of mist and layers of faded voices. Another synth line draws some electronic scrawls which make slow twists in a sound mirage which plunges us at full into the atmospheres of Into the Blue. Sequences tinkle in background. Their ringings get more and more persistent while a line of bass and fine percussions are drumming the first structure of rhythm of this long sonic river of 35 minutes. The percussions and the bass weave a kind of slow cosmic Groove where everything is soft, where everything is very ethereal. An electronic nightingale presents us funny songs which go and come in this ballet for carillons and percussions where the heat of tones, and its contrasts, guides us towards a waking dream. The synth layers perfume the background decoration of an anesthetic mi st, leaving to the saxophone the care of throwing us its harmonies for weakened souls. The progression is slow. Structured always on a soft, hardly ambient rhythm, it remains a prisoner of this very beautiful carousel of carillons where the glass arpeggios are tinkling in random way and where other elements of split up rhythms feed a hardly chaotic sweetness. And always these songs of nightingales. And always these perfumes of saxophone which embalm a solitude supported by layers of astral choirs. This soft rhythm takes another tangent towards half-time with more accentuated leaping, or chirping according to our perception, which get lost in a long sizzling humming. Electronic Ballad” dives then into a kind of down-tempo fed by bass pulsations which skip and which beat a measure without precise pattern and where are patrolling serpentines of sequences. The last eight minutes bring “Electronic Ballad” towards a very ambiospherical phase where we re-hear more clearly these undulated waves which structured its wall of atmospheres since the very beginning