Hello folks,
a new review of AQUADORSA "Cloudlands" by Vital Weekly 683
" This is a new name, well at least to me it is. Behind Aqua Dorsa we find
Italy's well-known master of all thing very ambient Oophoi and a new name,
Enrico Coniglio. The latter gets credit for guitars, synthesizers,
programming and sampling, while Oophoi takes control of synthesizers,
piano, percussion, waterphone, chimes, singing bowls, theremin,
programming and sampling. Seeing this being released by Glacial Movements,
a label who announce themselves as 'ambient' and 'isolationist', and taken
Oophoi's previous output in account, you know which direction this. This
is ambient music but then with a little bit more, and no doubt Coniglio is
the man responsible for that extra bite. Not simply satisfied with 'just'
ambient synthesizer textures, there is an addition from the world of
microsound to this. Underneath the warm tapestries are woven of
synthesizers playing sustained textured sounds, but the icing (pun
intended) on the cake comes from the crackles, buzz and hiss that are on
top of this. That makes that this music moves out of the usual ambient
field, and blends together ambient and microsound, while, because its not
entirely generated in the digital realm, its not entirely ambient glitch
either. A marriage that works wonderfully well, I'd say. Deep atmospheric
textures, icy glitches on top. Maybe the album as a whole is a bit long.
One long track could have easily been skipped to make the album even a bit
stronger, where it now is a bit too much of the same here and there. But
its a fine altogether. (FdW) "
and another new one by Norman Records:
" I feel like I'm in trapped some sort of ambient corner here sometimes. I appear to have become the office ambient beard without even realising! Well here's a CD of 'ambience' by Aqua Dorsa who are a couple of chilled out Italian dudes from all account. You know my brother in law was calling both his wife and child dude the other day. It must have been very confusing for them.... Anyway one of these Italians is Oophoi who is a reasonably well known ambient lord and if you've not heard his work then you should check it out. A couple of minutes into this and there's some beats and all sorts of stuff going on. In fact it reminds me a lot of when I first heard ambient music back in the late 80's when it was essentially just slowed down and more chilled out techno. There used to be a lot more going on in ambient music than you get these days. Cloudlands is one of those 'interesting' ambient albums and it harks back to those times where more shit was happening on the stereo and it's not just a long drawn out piece of music based around a whale farting. Well worth a punt!
by Phil "