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Giuseppe Falivene - Breeze EP

Updated: Feb 23, 2018




Shimmering Moods Records has quickly become a blog favourite over here at Stone in Focus, releasing album after album of some of the most expansive and emotionally evocative ambient music with such a consistency and ear for quality, that simply choosing which of their incredible recent releases to review first has proved to be quite a difficult task. Amongst a vast catalog of such incredible music, it is both intriguing, not to mention an absolute testament to it's own transportive abilities, that the release to have pulled me in most completely also happens to be one of the labels shortest; sitting at just over 17 minutes over the course of three tracks, Italian ambient artist Giuseppe Falivene's latest EP, despite a deceptively short run time, feels anything but brief.


The word "breeze" brings to mind a sort of gentle passivity, a pleasant, if barely noticeable symptom of mild climates and inoffensive weather; an ironic choice of title for an album that moves less like a gentle breeze than an all encompassing, impossibly powerful solar wind, accumulating and carrying with it the electrified charges of entire celestial bodies as it passes through. This wind carries the listener through uninhabited corners of the universe, eventually settling on the frigid reaches of some unknown ice-planet, utterly devoid of life, yet churning with an unseen internal force.


Fractures acts as a sort of aural landing party, gently descending the listener into a harsh landscape of relentless winds and frozen oceans, towering mountains reaching towards the heavens like some affront to the gods, and carrying from their hidden peaks an endless drift of a vaguely alien, luminescent snow. A low rumble shakes the ground, revealing itself not to be solid ground, but in fact a shifting, grinding layer of sheet-ice, fracturing exponentially and sending each frozen island drifting on their own respective paths towards oblivion.


Throughout the entirety of the Breeze EP is an inescapable sound of degradation and collapse, synthesizers sounding like ancient artifacts, uncovered after thousands of years from beneath layers of ice and snow. Lush, heavenly synth pads descend between parting clouds on Tundra, bright synthesized flutters bringing a much needed glimpse of light and sensation of warmth on their tails; but the ancient hardware, removed from the protection of it's own icy tomb, has been left out in the elements for too long, each swelling note bringing more and more resistance as keys begin to stick, signals sending confused messages as sustained notes are deprived of their ability to fade organically, instead crushed out of existence like chunks of ice sifted and ground into a fine powder and dispersed in the wind.


Album closer A cold day swallows the listener up completely in a drone of absolute ethereality, moving with the inexplicable profundity of dim lights reflecting underwater, and bringing with it a feeling of such utter weightless, a warmth so consuming, so as to bring a vague sense of concern. How did you get here? Where did all the lights go? As waves of crushed ice begin to swell around you, you come to a shocking realization, followed immediately by a peaceful acceptance; that this is the warmth one feels only between the cold, and the long, final darkness. Ghostly field recordings, like the voices of the people you love, and the memories that formed you, churn around the listener, calling from a distance just out reach. A faint, blue pinprick of sky grows smaller and smaller. As the sounds begin to fade you are overcome by a peaceful stillness; neither warm, nor cold, you lay suspended in what can only be described as a maternal, eternal embrace; your spirit ascending, and joining the solar winds on their continuous course towards infinity.


https://shimmeringmoodsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/breeze-ep

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