By: Daniela Patrizi
Ekca Liena | website | bandcamp |
Released on March 6, 2015 via ConSouling Sounds
My latest new discovery of the year is again a courtesy of ConSouling Sounds, the Belgian doom, post-rock, drone and ambient label that keeps on releasing great music. At first, the name Ekca Liena, may not trigger any particular memories, but dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that under this moniker there’s Daniel Mackenzie, a musician that surely has appeared on your radar before. The Brighton based musician is famous for his experimental sound sprinkled with improvised percussion and piano notes.
Tender chords and fragile melodies float everywhere in the beautiful darkness of Graduals, the last work of the artist as Ekca Liena. In the seven movements of Graduals the ambient drones, the distorted guitar line and the evolving, atmospheric textures are mixed all together like a big mass that moves around and changes its shape. It explodes too but other times it drops off into silence. The sound is so dense that also silence here has its own musicality.
The music that Ekca Liena delivers is deep and the songs are like running diapositives that will take the listeners through vast lands and dreamscapes. Lay down, close your eyes and rise the volume: this is the best way to experience the journey of Graduals.
One of the highlights of the album is ‘Free Precipitation’ that with its 13 minutes is a journey in a journey. There’s a slow but sensual sound here that’s like a nearby galaxy whose light emerges from behind a grey nebula of gas and dust. The stars are bright enough for us to be able to see them, but a dense cloud of noises is always there filtering the starlight. The rhythm is slow yet pursuing and involve the listener’s demanding his participation in shaping the sound. The same happens in the other tracks too. Take ‘Mattie Devore’ for example: the minimal melodies and the splendid synths emerge from the noise, dense sound and they are warm and can be quite cathartic.
Graduals is an album that takes its own time to unfold, and it can be understood only by listening to it in its entirety. Every moment of the record can be seen as a distinctive perspective of the same bigger image whose minimalism is always present and just set aside in favour of a cloud with a wide degree of drone, ambience and noise elements that together create an intelligent and dramatic mix of sounds.
Graduals is not easy, but, as a beautiful mermaid, it captivates and lures the listener who, unaware of the bigger, illusory plan, falls victim of it. Irremediably.
