Bruno Sanfilippo & Mathias Grassow - Ambient music
Album: Ambessence piano & drones - Ambient music
http://www.bruno-sanfilippo.com/AMBESSENCE.htm
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/ambessence-piano-drones/id282732047
http://brunosanfilippo.bandcamp.com/
by Paul Jury - Morpheus Music - UK 2008
Beautiful, soft, elegant piano melodies and subtle, enveloping drones. Ambessence piano and drones sets a new level of blissful dreaminess. Hazy, gossamer breathing strains with the lightest of touches hang weightless, shapeless as if the very air itself has been transformed into to music. Sometimes the underlying sonic textures are so transparent they might simply be environmental recordings, a thickening of emptiness. From within come the most exquisitely delicate piano lines you might imagine, the most sensitive of fragile forms, muted phrases and dulcet progressions that seem to have all the time in the world in which to unfurl - each fresh piece as beguiling, as graceful as the last. The balance between melody and ambient space is expertly worked so that you never quite feel that you are listening to 'tunes' as such, yet the gradual, spacious unfolding
of these melancholy arrangements has you captivated - pulled along like a fallen leaf on
a stream.
ARTWORK The album cover features a photograph by Dianne Owen of what appear to be Anton Gormley's Another Place figures from the Mersey Estuary. Sculpted sentinels stand upright gazing through waves of digital mists - serene, dignified, bathed in grey - attentive, absorbed. This image recurs throughout the package in varied form.
On the reverse is a timed tracklist and a recommendation on how to listen to the album. Within we find a portrait of each musician set against a panel of credits, website details and a breakdown of instrumentation.
OVERALL Released on Ad21 on the date of the label's 10th anniversary, this latest release sees Argentinean Bruno Sanfilippo in collaboration with the prolific German drone and overtone musician Mathias Grassow. The seven tracks vary from just over six minutes through to just short of fifteen - a total of one hour, one minute and fifty seconds of pure escape. This release could easily become a tranquil backdrop to your day should you wish it - but if you actually give yourself over to it and listen completely you will be transported, so far from daily life is this musical place, a place of lightness, sleepy introspection and safety. Such economical, fragile keyboard work inevitably calls to mind the gentler compositions of Satie - yet these musicians somehow manage to free their pieces almost of all gravity altogether. I can't recommend this CD highly enough.
