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5 Textures (41'09") demonstrates that the music making abilities of Simon Lomax are at a veteran's level. An album designed for playing late at night, 5 Textures explores an interior world of ideas and emotions. Exposing glimpses of his dark side, Lomax presents six works of uncharted solitude. The opening piece feels like a small infinity, traveling towards the unknown - yet there are five more well-executed tracks in wait. On this album harmony is represented as a figure undifferentiated from the sonic landscape. Abstracted and fragmented forms, and not subject, are the principle carriers of meaning. Lonely piano notes proceed above breathing atmospheres, as clean guitar plucks gain color through grains of distortion. Forlorn chords undulate, and hang in the air, while otherworldly voices permeate the soundspace. A sustaining violin note briefly offers something familiar, only to recede amidst the flow of lush electronic current. Beneath Lomax's vast chill designs is a burning ember. His realizations grow out of the free blending of process and intuition. Lomax has imagined himself quite deeply into the world he presents here. Elegant and haunting, serenely powerful, 5 Textures is ever in motion, ever in flux. To categorize it as an Ambient album would undercut Lomax's achievement. The spell created by slow motion tone clouds and iced over synthesizers opens up a zone where beauty exists as part of daily life, and not as an escape from it. His use of sound can be dramatic, but also infinitely subtle in its scale of values - as the music Lomax makes traces a seductive arc from darkness to light, from melancholy to hope. His work belongs to the elegiac and inventive world where but a few respected spirits dwell.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 30 April 2015 |
