Walter Holland 2024
The Sketchbook Of Max Ernst
Drenched in synesthesia, six translations of arresting images into sonic pictures from American master of instrumental sentiment.
Once upon a time, in 1990, this musician took part in the various-artists endeavor titled “Dali: The Endless Enigma” that first indicated the San Diegan’s interest in Dadaism, but it took him a few decades to dedicate an entire album to one of the movement’s most prominent figures. Even though the Californian’s fairly recent “Storyteller” duplet may have signaled his detour to folk, “The Sketchbook Of Max Ernst” finds Walter Holland on a more familiar electronic terrain, where appropriate avant-garde motifs add to, rather than detract from, deceptively tranquil ambience of his earlier oeuvre. With each of the mini-epics on offer named after an Ernst opus, there’s still an intermittent shift of emotions aimed to immerse the listener into the world of visual, yet invisible, art.
The audience is allowed, encouraged even, to let their imagination run free, from spoken-word-spiced, deliciously spacey opener “The Marriage Of Heaven And Earth” on, to the magnificent, cosmic panorama of “L’Ange du Foyer” which brings this series of riveting soundscapes to a close. However, it’s more than mere escapism towards ethereal reveries sculpted by Walter’s guitars and keyboards and Steve Leonard’s synthesizers whose dynamic scope will slowly reveal alluring immensity. Here and there, Holland’s progressive rock roots come to the surface, while incidental blues licks and heavy riffs that puncture the faux-orchestral tapestries, or the multifaceted grooves that “The Beautiful Season” weave in and out of focus, are less expected and, thus, are awe-inspiring. So if “Of This Men Shall Know Nothing” fluctuates in an almost abstract manner before blooming like a flower in terms of amplitude and turning into a spectral oratorio, and the otherwise serene, albeit organ-bolstered, “The Elephant Celebes” injects new-age flow with orchestral intensity and the trumpeting of the titular beasts, the Prokofiev-evoking “The King Is Playing With The Queen” elevates the record’s character to dramatic heights, setting the scene for a quasi-fugue finale.
A soul-stirring masterpiece.
*****
