HALL OF MIRRORS

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.

Hall of mirrors is a new musical project formed by Giuseppe Verticchio (Nimh) and Andrea Marutti (Afeman, Amon...). The music is in the similar vein to the respective works from these two italian artists. Consequently it provides a handful of dense, droney, shimmering electronic sequences that dissipate into distortion and black noises. The atmosphere is truly hypnotic and dreamy, sometimes offering subtle, fragile minimalist melodic fragments for e-guitar. Entrance opens this mesmerising dark epic voyage with a playful, foggy and melancholic composition dominated by echoing guitar parts and fuzzy abrasive noises. Everything is floating into a deep space. Descent is an organic, tripped out industrial effervescence with cloudy, menacing continuous sound forms, guitar distortion that progressively turn into a moody electronic melancholia with a really absorbing atmosphere. Transmutation is an enigmatic, super abstract meditative piece built on an ocean of weird drones and noises. Recovery closes the album with a magnificant, plaintive, delicate e-guitar piece that transport the listener to some other place. Quite lovely and mysteriously invocative. This album must be regarded as a little classic in the serie of damaged, dreamy, emotional dronescapes. Highly recommend for fans of black minimal electronic epics of Organum, Andrew Chalk, Maurizio Bianchi. Anyone else can also have a listening because this album contain some of the most beautiful, expressive drones ever created in the last couple of years.