NAGUAL - LES AILES DE LA PERCEPTION

One of the things that I absolutely love about Igor Wakhevitch is his tendency for eclecticism. On any one of his albums, you are guaranteed a listening experience that incorporates at least a few different elements - electronic music, choral singing and/or chanting, beautiful strings, tribal percussion, etc. - and these elements are found either playing solo or all together in a mash-up of confused and beautiful sound. Nagual (Les ailes de la perception) is no different an experience.

This album, like Let's Start, has a strong leaning towards Wakhevitch's more beautiful side with tracks like "Never Poem for the Other", "The Smile of the Wolf on the Bench", "Beginning of Peter's Journey", which feature bouncy and cheerful playing of acoustic piano or guitar. In my opinion, the hopefulness of these tracks overpower the darker, brooding tracks such as the title track, the two "In the Nagual's Time" tracks, and "Spenta Aramati", which all have a typical electro-acoustic sound but with Wakhevitch's unmistakable touch. Unfortunately, these electro-acoustic tracks just don't have as great a punch as similar works on Wakhevitch's previous albums.

The tracks that stand out to me the most, besides the beautiful acoustic instrumental tracks that I've mentioned, would be "Hunapuguch" which is mainly steady mid-paced tribal percussion with a flowing drone in the background and feels quite brooding and mischievous and really gets the ritual feeling across that Wakhevitch has always been so great at, and "Cinderella" is a wonderful short interlude that take the acoustic instrument approach as before (this time with a music-box type of instrument) and adds a subtle electronic popping/crackling that all comes together to make a pleasantly creepy track. The album ends on it's best track, the symphonic and cinematic 8-minute long "Chirakan-Ixmucane", which is nearly entirely electronic save for a few moody string parts, but the synths are very much the focus of this adventure. As much as this track is great and a standout for this album and in Wakhevitch's discography, it's a bit too cosmic sounding considering the tribal and acoustic tone set by all of this album's previous tracks. Regardless, very well done and quite an enjoyable track.

A Nagual is the Mesoamerican folk name for what is now commonly called a shapeshifter, and the French portion of this album's title translates to "The Wings of Perception" (Naguals, as folk tells it, commonly took form as turkeys for whatever reason). I have no idea what this has to do with the music on this album, but I suppose if you sincerely want to try to string together imagery in your head of supernatural Mesoamerican turkeys, ultimately ascending into space, then this is the fuel for such imagination. Nagual (les ailes de la perception), in my opinion, plays out like a very "Peter and the Wolf" type of long-form composition that would possibly benefit from an accompanying written story-line or possibly even narration.