ARTEMIY ARTEMIEV & PETER FROHMADER

"Space Icon"
 (1999)

From the highly adventurous "Electroshock Records" label in Russia comes a recording featuring the combined efforts of electroacoustic ambient artist Artemiy Artemiev and synthesist/guitarist Peter Frohmader. "Space Icon" covers all kinds of superb musical ground. Featuring high octane guitar and guitar loops over a bed of synths and percussion effects, spacey synth washes, serene soundscapes, and dark moody atmospheric trips into the shadows. This is heady stuff, but it's also a most rewarding listening experience. The nineteen-minute title cut features electric guitar, heavily revered, looping and jumping and circling around a variety of rhythmic and arrhythmic percussion effects. Underneath is a current of synthesizers that flows like a river of dark night. However, the piece itself is more musical than you might imagine. The two or three guitar parts color the song with flashes of iridescent light as the notes and chords flash and streak across the inky sky. As the song winds along, spacey synth notes zap with laser-like immediacy. Can you tell I like this song? "Mir" is a deep ambient drifting piece fueled by high-end (almost church organ-sounding) keyboards and a mysterious wind effect. A beautiful but sad melody line plays on a solitary keyboard as mid tempo percussive effects enter the song. The drifting elements of the song are counterpointed by these percussion textures and the underlying washes lend the piece an overall disturbing air. This is an imaginative deep space cut with combinations of textures I have never heard brought together before.  Heralded by what sounds like a distorted bell-like tone, "Channeling" features dark ambient synthesizers and assorted odd instrumentation (bent bass notes, metal scraping noises, percolating synths) while in the deep background of the song is what can only be described as the footsteps of someone walking down a dark hallway. These bizarre synth effects are juxtaposed with, of all things, harp-like notes. The result is some wild hybrid of the ethereal with the almost surreal organic. Liquid notes seem to hang in the air as the synths feel like they're oozing electro-organic energy.  "Zen Garden" is simply gorgeous. Gongs (per the liner notes) and lush synth strings are matched with subtle but vaguely disquieting percussive effects that come and go. There is a deep feeling of contemplation with this cut, as befits the title, but the song is less serene than you might expect. Compared to the rest of this CD, the song comes across as peaceful, but it sure isn't new age music. It's music borne of a fading day's light. The album closes with the twenty-three minute "Cosmic Jungle" which is a dark ambient excursion into, well, a cosmic jungle. Keyboards hum and buzz, peculiar sounds seem to erupt out of nowhere. Was that a strange bird I just heard? What kind of insects are making those noises? Are those drums in the distance? Highly vitalistic, this is a song to play in the dark and wait for the walls to come alive.

(c) Bill Binkelman / Wind & Wire