FORGOTTEN REALM

Forgotten Realm is the second album published by the duo Andrea Marutti (Never Known, Amon, Sil Muir) and Giuseppe Verticchio (Nimh) under the project name Hall of Mirrors. In this new release, they are seconded by guest musicians Andrea Feschi and Andrea Ferraris who provided some field recordings and some guitar parts. If their first offering was a shadowy heavily lugubrious atmospheric ambient manifest (made of static, ferocious, muted dreamscapes), Forgotten Realm is much more a primal-alchemical music procession that could be nocturnal hyms to the genesis, to the ancient time. Consequently the dynamic dronescapes and textural electronic waves are profundly expressive and intuitively beatific. The serene and deeply absorbing ethno-electronic pieces are stylistically closed to the most ascentional synthesised works by Alio Die, Vidna Obmana, Arold Budd (...) but with much more emphasise on nocturnal motives. Thus it is less luminous and most vertiginous with a constant association to memnonic traces, fractured living memories and melancholic visions. The opening track is an organic classic ambient piece with long chordal dronespheres. Gates of Namathur is partly uses acoustic instruments that seem to flow in a magic whorship. Decadent splendour is a moody-funereal sanctified music ritual for echoing guitar chords and foggy harsh noises. This is among my favourites, the perfect way to experience contemplative ecstasy through music. Among the ruins is a detached soundscape that connects us to some other worlds. The atmosphere is progressively charged with some kind of high tension including buzzing noises and doom like feelings. During the last minutes we go back to the heavenly origins with superb acoustic flute lines. The album closes with an utterly dark and primordial synthscape, admitting hermetic cyclical melodies into it and guitar epic dreaminess. Forgotten Realm is a voluptuous-essential vertical trip in cristal like spheres and lost paradises.

Dronescaping through utterly maddening industrial noises and blissful (almost ritual/religious like) ethereal sounds.

Hall of Mirrors' "Forgotten Realm",2009, presents both opposite sonic worlds to the extreme, which helps to enhance both fully , without diminishing their true power of expression by not blending these extreme electronic languages. Therefore the contrasts between tracks or sections are a constant which helps to enrich the sensation of witnessing both worlds objectively.

On the instrumental side this release's guitar work guides most of the heavenly like sections as the addition of flute and didgeridoo, while the field recordings bring in the earthly country side sensation and electronic noises move along their respective spectrum's colors from, the audible and the inaudible, White noise to Pink to Brown to Blue to Violet and Grey.

Creative musical ideas flow freely but it is impossible not to sense the perfectly tight music composition behind this solidly structured yet seeminly aleatoric, abstract and transparent dronescapes.

As far as the always hard task to rate by 5 numbers and adding also that I had already been aquainted, almost simultaneously, with this duo/ensemble's next future masterwork, I will strongly recommend it as an excellent addition to your electronic music collection and as a highly coherent, contemporary and original Prog-Electronic work by its own.

****4.5 PA stars.