Jacaszek - Glimmer

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release

5...according to our Brian on Thu 08 Dec, 2011.

Michal Jacaszek is a Polish chap who's been constructing beautiful experimental classical-based soundworlds for quite some time now. Now housed on respected experimental electronic stable Ghostly, his latest opus Glimmer carries a flaming torch for the more baroque Eastern forms of chamber music mingled with abstract electronics and flickering scrunches/loops of dense sound art. It weighs in somewhere between Deaf Center, 'Tides'-era Arovane, Third Eye Foundation and Machinefabriek and is a massively meditative if not occasionally unsettling listen taking in moody pulverising sonics, sinister aural crevices and tender sweeping orchestration. You'll find all this merging into one uneasy alliance that pulsates, groans, thunders and thrums, sometimes as on 'Pod Swiatło' like a magnificent swirling malevolent storm, one which you are quite happy to get caught right in the eye of. Alarmingly powerful and often tender, graceful stuff.

For the past decade or so, Polish musician Michal Jacaszek has been exploring a new, resolutely modern chapter in Eastern Europe’s long, storied love affair with classical music. His creations are painstakingly crafted collages of electronic textures and baroque instrumentation, harpsichords being swarmed by woolly static one minute and pulled
apart by billowing wind the next. Ambient music—if we can generalize unnecessarily for a second—is rarely so sonically challenging.

Jacaszek’s latest album, Glimmer, is marked by a noticeable tug between melancholy and beauty, like it’s hovering in some gaseous grey area between both, at once both insular and extroverted. “I tried again to create some fragile beauty glimmering behind the veil of reality,” he says. “I built a kind of curtain out of dirts and fuzzes, and used pure
sound of clarinet and harpsichord playing beautiful melodies as a contrast to its harshness.” This winking, push-and-pull tension runs deep and constant throughout the 40-odd-minute journey to the end.

To parse an album so deeply experiential and deliberately cohesive track-by-track seems unfair, almost ludicrous. But there are undisputed highlights—the apocalyptic crescendo at the end of “Evening Strains To Be Time’s Vast,” with its crunch of nightmarish noise and bit-crushed distortion; the dizzying, obscenely pretty tangle of Spanish guitar in “As
Each Tucked String Tells.” Glimmer is, quite simply, an album that’s easy to get lost in without being easy to ignore. Don’t expect any eyelid drooping while it’s on.

TRACKLISTING:

1. Goldengrove 2. Dare-gale 3. Pod Swiatło 4. Evening Strains To Be Time’s Vast 5. Seiden Stille 6. What Wind-Walks Up Above! 7. Only Not Within Seeing Of The Sun 8. As Each Tucked String Tells 9. Windhover

pradeep v. nerurkar said:

Great works of art.....................!

So, what do you think? Best reviewer each month gets £10 off their next order!