Title: Night Of The Endless Beyond
Artist: Lord Of The Isles
Label: ESP Institute
Cat Number: ESP108
Genre: Soundtrack To The Dawn Of Time
A1: Endless Beyond
A2: Isolarian
B1: Strato
B2: Together
C1: Night Lights
C2: Quadralogue
C3: Otherness
D1: Truth
D2: Wonder
D3: Postdrome
This, the ESP follow up album to 2016’s ‘in Waves’ and Lord Of The Isles’ 4th long player overall is a journey through the inky blackness of wherever you visualise. It’s a listening experience which shrugs off time as an abstract concern and evokes the beginning of intelligent life on this planet. It’s also a collection that will stand comparison with seminal pieces of work in the same vein: Boards Of Canada spring to mind, but there are others. The listening experience is both a complicated and straightforward one, as this is an album which is a totally immersive experience and a deeply personal one. It’s also full of positivity and optimism. In spite of its pervasive dark hues I detect no negativity within the grooves. The album pivots on ‘Strato’ and ‘Quadralogue’, which depart slightly from the organic ambience preceding and following them in order to jolt the listener into some sort of waking state. However, this is a temporary state of affairs, as the subsequent tracks pacify, and superimpose a state of sensory deprivation and slide once again into the ether. Before and after these lodestones the sense of narrative is anything but flat, with tracks like ‘Truth’ adding a sense of foreboding, and ‘Wonder’ the fluctuations of life coming into being. ‘Endless Beyond’ is an onomatopoeic, self-perpetuating chasm; ‘Together’ intermittently embraces the possibility of breathing but lacks the persistence that will emerge later on the evolutionary scale, and just when you thought an about turn wasn’t coming, ‘Night Lights’ charms and enchants with its warmth and affection. Pretty much perfect this.
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