Krystian Shek - What Was Before? - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Cue up a new Krystian Shek , and it makes for a time of automatic rejoicing. The man has shown a limitless ability to crack any old electronica nut through the years, starting with his very early FAX recordings unveiled to us via the late Pete Namlook's expert tutelage. Celestial Court holds forth in the expected manner, threading it's way across a veritable starfield of opulent ambience, twinkling synths, and an almost fairy-tale aesthetic. Shek is perhaps one of Namlook's prime FAX grad students who have taken his notion of 'new environmental music' to heart. InchHopeInch surely points the way there, marrying birdsong to a rugged dub-techno aesthetic minus the techno it's an absolutely riveting slice of 2001-like melancholia, Vangelis-tinted grandeur, and Yagya-flavored animotion. InchSolaceInch also acclimatizes us in expert fashion, ushering in contemplative weather systems wherein late summer rainfall is further mimed in a torrential sequencer downpour, burbles, bangles, and beads reflecting off shiny silver surfaces. Shek is but one of the few synth glitterati who not only imparts majesty on his digital landscapes but the right tincture of emotional rescue when called for InchMoment of TruthInch is one such lovely piece, steeped in the kind of synthetic hush-hush Robert Schroeder's made famous, but embellished with Shek's singular touch and enveloping warmth. Go gaga over it all.

2018 . Krystian Shek released a number of superb and still underrated albums on Namlook's FAX imprint over the years; his first Carpe Sonum offering, 2014's Sometimes Not, was a bracing return to form, and al-Qahirah is the follow-up, and it's a dandy, a longform slice of far-flung ethnotronica that speaks within dub's mother tongue but jettisons the lockstep rhythmic underpinning. In so doing, Shek's augured quite a brilliant thing digidub that is all languid pools of sound, froth, reverberation, and echo, plunging the listener into a vast abyssal chamber whose sounds mimic the detritus found in long-abandoned sensory deprivation tanks. Yet the whole experience is becalming, welcoming, and thoroughly non-isolationist throughout the fifteen-minute excursion of the title track, we are treated to a rainbow coalition of thrillingly sculpted shimmers lighting up a desert night sky like some man-made aurora borealis. Shek's skill lies in his ability to showcase works of 'ambience' that are leagues removed from Eno's hoary old definition-this is a music of flares and fanfare, bursting with light, drunk on the absinthe of nature.

The Tres temas de recuerdos are inspired chapters of memory that Jaume Pahissa (1880-1969) composed for guitar in 1938 in Argentina, evoking nostalgia for his distant Catalan homeland that he was forced to leave in 1937 owing to the Spanish civil war. Besides their meditative beauty, these pieces also offer us the inspiration for the title of this , similarly prompted by 'recollections'. This is expressed, in fact, through a programme that to a great extent embodies the special role played by 'memory', thanks to various pieces that engender emotional reference within the collective imaginary. Pieces that are deeply rooted in the conscience of those who love the guitar and it's close association with it's most representative historical figures. Alongside these pieces inspired by memory, their composers and their arrangers, and the symbolic reality that each of them reveals, I have added other works, perhaps less familiar to the public at large. These are instead linked - more or less openly - to my more personal references, associated with the passing of my own experience; so these too, on account of their individual peculiarity, are included as part of the Temas de recuerdos that I am proposing here, in the hope that they can also become such for the listener. That is, I attempt to understand the reason for this more personal association in certain pieces that are particularly suitable for the purpose, by exploring them from within like reflecting oneself in one's own reiterated sonic presence, almost wishing to find a secret account of the steps of one's own story. The hope is to unveil within the identity of these themes the birth of an unforeseen source of affection for our own life. (Stefano Grondona)