HALL OF MIRRORS

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.

Hall of Mirrors 3 full releases (Reflections On Black- 2007, Forgotten Realm-2009 and Altered Nights-2012) have been spinning in my studio for some time now. I, in this carrousel of their music, have found a tendency to turn back to "Altered Nights", thus I chose it as my first Hall of Mirrors review.

Hall of Mirrors is fronted mainly by Andrea Marutti and Giuseppe Verticchio, although this release features many other fellows.

Hall of Mirrors' sound has a distinctive "coven" like quality. Many, you may suggest, deal with this kind of environments, but few, I may add, are so consciously centered in between obscure and light, therefore resembling the true ritual of finding your own path, be it white or black. No imposition on your will as long as you are searching or at least know where you are heading. If I feel the likes of the obscure or find myself in state of enlightment or detached from humanity's mechanics or hungry for mystery or inspiration, this release has an strange quality in following and filling these moods with alternate and enticing, but never forceful, paths of companionship.

There are no user friendly sections or intentions, no mainstream prog happy twinkling bells nonsense, nor obscure "bad boy" antics, opposite to that the music grows monumentally and organically like a living entity, half angel/half beast, too huge to actually care to be anyone's b-tch.

"Altered Nights", as I mentioned, features many collaborators and these fellows bring on to the table all their abilities and it becomes so enriching to get lost in this extremely well crafted, "full house", pulse/drone/noise music labyrinths.

Flawless, non-stop creative, dynamic, unique, daring and uncompromising and yes, as mentioned, monumental.

*****5 PA stars.

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.