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Solina (74:33) by Craig Padilla is more than just another antique analogue synthesizer demo. It shows us what can be achieved when an artist sets about being adventurous, alert and bold. The inventive album that Padilla has realized is totally alive, providing us with an expanded repertoire of ways to listen and transcend. Across five clarifying soundscapes, each containing a small cosmos of atmospheric possibilities, Padilla explores and exploits the potential and properties of his ARP String-Ensemble SE-IV - and a sound and texture that goes back to the earliest days of contemporary EM. Highlighting this musician's deep engagement with this heirloom quality keyboard, Solina may feed our nostalgia for a time that seems, from this distance, promisingly free. With a seeker's heart he plays his instrument's highly identifiable string patches in consonant chords over sustaining synth jams of New Age magic. In a slow building generative turbulence thick tones resolve in a harmonic heaven - which moves and shimmers like the idling warp cores of waiting stardrive engines. While lush sonorities sigh and whisper their celestial concord, prolonged passages of synthetic reverie hold forth above a venting sonic mass. Quite comfortable to take in, Solina provides a soundtrack to new electronic destinations - and the wonderful realm outside of everything else. The only danger here is feeling too deeply. The music is beautiful, as it asks us to look within, to look without, and to look back on an early era of music and technology, yet still consider the hopeful waves of the future emanating from up ahead.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 9 May 2024 |
