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Ian
Eccles-Smith: Apsilene
The iridescent barrage of colors that saturate its cover almost directly indicate what kind of music one might expect to hear from this album: mercurial sensory overload. What comes to mind is how the music of the instrumental band Tristeza, more times than not, lulls the listener through a creatively stagnant song structure that lacks boldness and life while managing to pull off interesting dynamic shifts in rhythm and instrumentation in ways that keep it fresh and interesting. The equation in the former example seems to point at the value of diversifying and reinventing the music, a process that Ian Eccles-Smith undoubtedly demonstrates through this Byzantine opus containing seven tracks lasting for over an hour that bleed into one another, further developing the artists core ideas for the project; however, the end result of this dabbling in ephemeral realities creates a similar state in the mind of the listener: nothing lasting or memorable. While it is clear that Eccles-Smith is classically trained and that his music is at times delicately sparse, giving one room to breath (at times only utilizing one or two instruments), the album as a whole comes off as a work that lacks minimalist conviction. It seems to do this in favor of the destruction of expectation, but it does so in a completely predictable way. Like a mainstream psycho-thriller where the viewer feels in constant inertia while being carefully guided towards an unforeseen end, the listener comes to ironically expect this unpredictability. Still, fans of Joe Satrianis Crystal Planet may enjoy the guitar work on this release as well as listeners of the bands Porcupine Tree and Tangerine Dream.
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