Iapetus / Unsung 2023
STEFANO CASTAGNA –
Sea Of Hopeless Angels
Accessing spirituality as a no-nonsense sentiment, two masters of ambience reach for continental nirvana where broken wings are healed.
Markus Reuter may not have performed “Fallen Angel” with THE CRIMSON PROJEkcT he used to be a part of but it doesn’t mean that the German guitarist is a stranger to seraphic matters and that he doesn’t need an occasional respite from the sturm-und-drang sonics of such endeavors as ANCHOR AND BURDEN. Here’s whence this collaboration with Italian multi-instrumentalist Stefano Castagna emerged from: Markus’s quest for quietude – so bliss with twists and turns he and Stefano aim for became the album’s defining characteristic. Designed to keep the listener immersed to the point of losing themselves in divinely elusive melodies, the seven pieces of “Sea Of Hopeless Angels” can result in rapture – without ever sounding rapturous.
These pieces feel cinematic on many a level, what with the record’s opener and closer referring to Wim Wenders’s characters. Still, if “Damiel” is given a groove to create urgency between the twang and strum of Reuter’s nervous strings and spaced-out passages of Castagna’s synths, before the two musicians unleash sparse, never-intrusive solos, “Cassiel” is possessed with Morricone-esque whistle and percussive detail to evoke, via artfully layered atmosphere, the image of lonesome entity shedding tears for humans and guarding the seventh heaven. There’s a harder edge to “Comfort And Trust” which dances across volume peaks and valleys yet ends up revealing an entrancing tune and permeating every fiber of the audience’s very soul, and celestially diaphanous aural resilience to the platter’s titular number whose surface tension and sheen get sprinkled with snippets of gravel crunch.
But while “Angels Fall” marries vibrancy to reverb to produce a vista where foreboding motifs come interspersed with moments of abject awe and abstract riffs appear embroidered with acoustic vignettes and covered with waves of noise, “Blood Gold” finds rapid electronic beats shooting through Stefano’s bass sway and Markus’s axe figures and dissolving in rivetingly contemplative pools of improv. So once “Ghost World” glides in, sending subliminal messages into one’s brain through fuzz and buzz, resisting such a path to the abyss of catharsis will seem impossible. A truly psyche-purifying album.
*****
