"A return to the fold for the highly prolific adroit guitar sculptor of ‘dreamscapes for hope & the facilitation of enlightenment’ Federico Balducci, and a label debut for the experimental, abstract artist Albérick (appearing under the avian inspired Fourthousandblackbirds moniker), this drone, ambient and contemporary classical collaboration proves a most congruous fit and balance of the sparring partners musical art forms.

The two mavericks compliment each other on a most atmospheric soundtrack of paranormal like communications and drifts. I say paranormal, the opening ‘Wake’ seems to be tapping into channel ether on an esoteric TV set. FTB for his part produces a sizzle and crackled tuning of fuzz, flits and squiggles, and a sort of quasi-haunted organ as Balducci drops and lingers lightly administered guitar phrases and notes that hang on the edge of slight dislocation and even jilt a little: nearly in dissonance. A chill of the subterranean and the Gothic permeates the renaissance corpus ebb and tide of the next suite, ‘Ligeti And Gira Floating In A Pool Filled With Soy Milk’. A reference I assume to both the Swans’ instigator Michael Gira and the famous avant-garde, contemporary classical doyen György Ligeti, this haunted pool of gauzy mirages could be said to straddle their inventive influences: especially Ligeti’s signature ‘musical hallucination’. ‘Lux’ dwells in a sort of dank cavern, though the guitar parts, harmonically echo, ting and sparkle with a certain lightness of touch. There’s a repeating chorus of bird song on the next passage, ‘Toxoplasmois’, to balance out the title’s reference to a parasitic disease. You can hear the resonance of Balducci’s hand movements, up and down the tingled spine of his guitar; some movements, gestures, brushes of which sound almost harp-like.

Finishing on a communicative broadcast, ‘Queen Of Mars’ pairs FTBB’s Morse-coded dot-dashes and synthesized glassy bobs with Balducci’s woozy spirals and cyclonic whittled notes. That last track, and the album’s title too, are both reference points to the Soviet sci-fi film vision Aelita: Queen Of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov and based on Alexi Tolstoy’s 1923 novel of the same name. “Anta Odeli Uta” is the alien message beamed from Mars, which notifies Earth of their presence. A sort of Bolshevik version of John Carter Of Mars, it tells the tale of a Soviet engineer travelling to the red planet in a rocket ship, where he soon leads a popular uprising against the ruling Elders and falls in love with the planet’s queen. Except it all turns out to be a daydream, which in a way is where this visitation soundtrack heads. For this collaboration is an incipient dream state that lurks and drifts across an atmosphere of the spooked, hallucinating and strange to great success. Let’s hope both partners on this journey continue to work together in the future."
~ Dominic Valvona
Monolith Cocktail
monolithcocktail.com