HEXERACTIME

After the most prolific year in which Senmuth has released about one album every two weeks, the 2011 starts with a two weeks journey to the beloved Egypt, maybe in search of new inspiration, then this first release of 2011 come out only in March.

During 2010 Senmuth released ambient or metal or ethnic oriented albums. In this album all the elements are present. The opener "Awakening Magnetar" is an industrial metal track, very heavy which presents a bit of space ambient in the last two minutes. For inofrmation, a magnetar means "magnetic star", that's a particular type of neutron star.

"Rotomahana(Quartzite Terraces)" is on the ethnic/ambient side. It has a soft far eastern mood until the guitar comes. However it never goes into the metal realm. I think it's one of the most melodic tracks ever released by the Russian, if anything of him can be called melodic. Rotomahana is a volcanic lake in New Zealand. The Quartzite terraces of the title were an incredible serie of natural terraces, pink and white which disappeared forever after an eruption in 1886.

Back to metal with "Midan Al-Tharir". This track is very heavy and, as usual, has the metal part interrupted by the intrusion of ethnic moments of indian instruments. This is something I'm too used to, and I start disliking them, but the metal parts of this track are very good. Midan Al-Tahrir is the famous place in the middle of Cairo City, not yet famous actually but today is the symbol of the "Arabian spring".

"Okteraktic Lake" is an alternance of calm dark-ethnic and death metal. In this case it's the ethnic part, specially the one after the first metal intrusion that's based on percussions that's very good. I don't know where the Okteraktic lake is, and neither if it's a lake or something else.

One could expect "Santalum Air" for its title to be a piece of Indian music, but it's an eclectic mixture of Indian and Industrial with the two souls mixed better than usual even if more tendent to metal than to ethnic.

"Metagalaxy" is the best album's track on which there's a bit more of composing effort. The track's structure is well defined and the guitar melody fits well with the pompous but dark background. Metagalaxy is a word used to indicate the totality of the galaxies in the observable universe, assumonig that the non-obsevable part is homogeneous.

"Binary Opposition" is a very good mixture of death metal guitar and Indian percussions. It's the kind of things of which Senmuth is a specialist, so no surprises. A pity that the alternance of parts is too usual. After about 100 albums I'm starting to get bored....

"Historical Sand Stream" is an evocative track of the ambient kind.intended as representing the flow of time. The album's title itself is the union of "Hexeract" and "Time", with the first being a six-dimensional hypercube (a tesseract has 4 dimensions only). Six dimensions in the strings theory are collapsed in a Calabi-Yau space.....

After a so "long" pause (in Senmuth's time unity of measure) I was expecting something more, however it's a good album which easily deserves the average 3 stars.