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Alpha Wave Movement - Terra CD (album) cover

TERRA

Alpha Wave Movement

Progressive Electronic


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Aussie-Byrd-Brother
SPECIAL COLLABORATOR
Honorary Collaborator
4 stars For over twenty years now, the Alpha Wave Movement, an alias for composer Gregory Kyryluk, has been delivering a colourful variety of evocative ambient and intelligent progressive electronic atmospheres over the course of more than twenty albums since forming in 1992. `Terra' is comprised of recordings from 2005 that accompanied a DVD of footage of New Zealand's natural landscapes from another ambient musician, Rudy Adrian, and this 2007 CD release adds an additional piece to offer a complete 49 minute album. Listeners don't need the visuals to simply enjoy this tasteful, floating and ambient progressive electronic collection.

With a soothing spectral choir and a gentle piano melody over delicate synth washes, opener `Emerald Passage' is easily one of Gregory's most romantic and loveliest pieces to date. The sedate `Liquid Garden' weaves approaching and retreating synth lulls, drifting ethereal pools, electronic trickles full of wonder and subtle swallowing bass blissfully together. `Slow Motion Halos' is thoughtful and gently melancholic, as careful electric piano raindrops fall around dramatic and elegant cinematic-like synths, yet always restrained.

Faint symphonic orchestral-like synth strains move through `Cloudmaker', and past and future collide throughout `Surrender and Flow', earthy natural tones bridged by cooling electronic waves, with a looping twinkling electronic ripple causing subtle psychedelic disorientation. `Sky Geometry' introduces slivers of percussive elements that move the album into more melodic territory, as well as offering warm and sweeping synth gestures. Album closer and bonus track to the original recordings `Terra Infinitus' is bookended with the ancient mystery of meditative chimes and pretty shimmering synth trills teeming with life and wonder, breaking away in the middle with dramatic looping patterns.

This album makes for an effective overview of several of the different kinds of progressive- electronic and ambient styles found throughout the Alpha Wave Movement discography. Calming and pleasing without ever becoming overly pretty and vapid New Age dreck, `Terra' works best as an unobtrusive background listen, perhaps in a quiet environment, and it would even make for an ideal introduction for newcomers to this project. It's further proof of an artist in Gregory Kyryluk that consistently displays great creativity, warmth and supreme taste in his vision of progressive electronic music, and as always, like all Alpha Wave Movement albums, `Terra' comes highly recommended.

Four stars.

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Posted Friday, April 17, 2015 | Review Permalink

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