| Artist: Terra Ambient Album: Wanderlust Released: 10 June 2009 |   |
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Recording under the name Terra Ambient soundscape artist Jeff Kowal brings together his passion for Ambient and World Music in an impressionistic synthesis of texture, sound and atmosphere. The CD title Wanderlust (51'26") epitomizes his drift between and across genres and disciplines. Kowal's fascinating musical realm is part digital, part primordial, and lies amidst his native flutes and tribal drums and the samplers and synthesizers he manipulates and programs to produce what seems like a lost continent of sound. The more energetic sections are propelled by percussion riffs that snake through each piece - stiffening like a spine. This area of Kowal's music is more about cycles than bars and measures. There are also many passages of ethereal bliss where reverberant pads move like slow clouds on the horizon and glowing tones flex and fade off into the hum of the universe. Composing music that is informed by molecular whispers in the blood yet still seems searching for a future; the work of Terra Ambient successfully joins technology and spirituality. Wanderlust does more than provide an atmosphere, this music provokes the imagination and gets to places we did not know were there.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 17 June 2009 | |
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