Eyeless In Gaza created one of the best ambient albums of the time with Pale Hands I Loved So Well, though it wouldn't do it justice to call it just an ambient album. Their instrumental vignettes were plunged in a spiritual fervour, and had the quality of fragile bitterwseet contemplations or of metaphysical longing.
"Tall And White Nettles" combines gentle guitar strumming, found sounds and eerie female vocals to great effect. The chamber music of "Blue Distance" is built around mysterious organ-drones, piano ripples, and imperceptible chanting. The mystical dance "Sheer Cliffs", which is half-gypsy and half-Indian, is truly a magical moment. "Falling Leaf/ Fading Flower" is a concerto for brass wails and gentle tones, part free-jazz and part electronic-experiment. "Lies Of Love" is another numinous dance, eventually expanding in a mist of metallic percussion, longing voices and Middle-Eastern brass. Beautiful.
"To Ellen" is possibly the most transcendental moment here; a spectral hymn of haunted organs and sublime vocals by a siren. "Pale Saints" is a fusion of free-jazz and musique concrete. "Letters To She" is an ecclesiastical chant combined with subsonic drones and unsettling electronic effects, culminating in hysterical celestial voices and orchestral ultrasonic frequencies, before finally settling for a pensive tone. This is the soundtrack to man's reincarnation as pure energy in outer space.
In comparison, "Light Sliding" sounds timid and shy, though still deployed like a philosophical reminiscence. Then "Big Clipper Ship" is yet another stunning eclectic moment, partly kosmische, partly European-folk, partly chamber, partly ethereal, partly exotica perscussion, partly militant march, and played in their usual recondite way. A fantastic ending to a fantastic album.
Get it here.
2 comments:
one of the best records ever released and definitely one of my top-5 vocalists of all time.
An amazing record indeed. -)
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