With Holographic Codex, Alio Die and Lorenzo Montaná have quite effectively blended their talents to produce seven tracks of eerie, dream-infused music that can easily travel the synapses of the mind, firing imagination along the way to deliver an experience.
Holographic Codex begins with the entry gate of “Muns de Etrah” to get you on the road. By the time you hit the second track, you have been whisked into the frightening disruptions of a horrifying reality complete with mutterings. Eventually, after running through several long pieces, you find yourself in a perturbation of space and time, completely agitated and stirred by the mechanized echos of “Silent Rumon”, a fifteen-minute walkway of fevered thought and visualizations.
The other fifteen-minute plus composition, “Cinta della Breccia Divina” delivers you into the hands of the album’s closer, “Eternal Wisdom”, a spacey work that feels like a float into the loneliness of the galaxy.
Ambient music is a genre that speaks to many by way of its story craft created by the use of sound, and fed directly into the brain, accessing the regions that have its own stored interpretations. This makes ambient a unique experience. Holographic Codex has its collection of stories waiting for you.
A distant sonic line amplifies its presence as the first seconds of "Muns de Etrah" are courting its first minute. The line is musical. It spreads a veil, as a shadow, which waves under the weight of its density. That becomes a meshing of breaths which hem in a shape of loop, escaping at the passage a slight filet of spectral breezes. The white noises arrive at the same time as the percussions. Their sober strikes shape a splendid down-tempo which sways hips in a sound universe which increases its wealth as the seconds flee "Muns de Etrah". While the percussions drum an abstract rhythm, escaping some scattered bangings here and there, fragile chords are ringing and weaken the spectral melody which embalms the universe of "Muns de Etrah" of which the supernatural veil is delicately shaken by percussions a little more lively . It's by a seducing down-tempo, wrapped in a psybient envelope, that Alio Die and Lorenzo Montanà attract us in the universe of “Holographic Codex”. For this first collaboration, the very eclectic duet mixes with delight their musical and spiritual visions, giving an album which crosses all the spheres of an EM which despise all borders. Whether it's psychedelic trance with long moments of sedative ambiences, while passing by the delicate rhythms of Pacific School, “Holographic Codex” proposes a music where the winds, the long guttural drones of Alio Die embrace Lorenzo Montanà's ambient and instinctive rhythms.
The first chords of "Hydra e Vers" are falling with a veil of hybrid feelings. The melancholy gets mixed with the esotericism with a strange prayer told on a dead structure that a discreet piano maintains on a breathing apparatus. It's very spectral, at the limit ethereal! We stay in ambient spheres with "Akvil" and its swarm of prisms, carillons which rings in long spectral groans. The music evolves towards a more oniric phase a little after the 2nd minute with synth waves which wrap up the singings of ectoplasms and deafen the noises of the carillons. It's a very meditative track where the darkness and the brightness come to titillate the subliminal. "Egetora" is clearly more ambient, darker. But between both, there is "Silent Rumon" and its strange spectral voices which blow and complain within an outcry of sibylline breezes. Even if very ambient, the introduction of "Silent Rumon" remains very captivating, very intrusive. Fine drummings bring the music to another level as soon as the bar of the 4th minute is crossed. The rhythm which comes then is delicate. Sculptured in the model Roach and of the Pacific School, it moves as rustles of feet, as a spiritual ballet on a carpet of lichen. It's more the elements which surround it which move it, which transport it. Riffs are thundering like the angers of the gods on rustles, singings and sometimes even shouts of anxiety, while a panoply of esoteric elements establishes a surrounding climate of spiritual trance. It's very intense and the effects which surround the music transports us literally somewhere else. I liked this a lot! My living room is illuminated of a strange aura when I put this track on. After the very black and ambient "Egetora","Cinta della Breccia Divina" assails our ears with noises of a boreal fauna, ringings and drones in an introduction rich in sound colors. It's very meditative, at the limit Buddhist with these ringings which sparkle in astral winds and vocal drones. The sonic fauna is rich and very versatile with tints and nuances which make that we don't really find that time passes slowly in this long route where the elements are the strength of a structure which moves, which evolves like a storm perturbs the course of clouds. Phenomenon that we also observe on the very ambient "Eternal Wisdom" and of which the breezes drop filet of voices which remind me Steve Roach's indiscretions on the structures of silence. It's a very beautiful ambient track. Introspective and meditative as we like!
I really liked this first collaboration between Alio Die and Lorenzo Montanà. I like these ambient and intuitive rhythms which are snaking roguishly this sibylline universe weaved in these enchanting sonic drones and these astral winds sparkling with one thousand prisms. The strength of this album rests on this skillful mixture of its tracks. “Holographic Codex” opens with strength and ends in the peace of mind, while making us live a range of rich feelings between the 50 minutes which separate both extremes; the cornerstone, the highlight being "Silent Rumon". But all around it revolve its shadows and its influences which have this gift to drag us constantly towards levels where the contemplativity takes holographic forms.
Sylvain Lupari / Synth & Sequences (March 10th, 2015)