lead: music for storms

lea-mfs.jpg (7k)adastra - 2000)

Giving voice to nature's tempestuous forces through Scott Bivens' processed guitars and John Michael Zorko's ambient electronics, lead creates music for storms. As dark and changeable as rain-laden thunderheads, these sounds generate abstract energies which have the power to inspire awe and to make the faint-hearted run for cover.

With subtle chaos brewing beneath its hovering layers of electronic gleam and glare, fore sets the stormy mood of shapelessly atmospheric things to come; hovering energies eventually are scuffed by abrasive lashings of static. Oblique rays penetrate the glowering powers which lurk in a hint of goliath (11:57). Thrumming drones are streaked with scritchy, almost-unidentifiable guitar sounds and darkly billowing electrowaves, a soundtrack for wandering a cloud-shadowed desert landscape.

From a silent shimmer, things soon reach the boiling point as funnel builds into a massive, continually thundering vortex from which thousands of tinkling shards emit; in a more subdued mode, sinuous feedback creepers extend and quest about. Low electro-mechanical patterns emerge as the engine finds it's way (2:19); machine-like hums impassively loop into several variations.

More amorphous stirrings as a distant call rollicks and roils; metallic strings echo and scratch from deep inside an ever-shifting murk of gargantuan proportions. Heavily blurred piano notes begin to trickle in sporadic streams as guitar scraps sizzle and flutter all around. Ten-minute closer, advent of cumulonimbus rumbles and rolls but doesn't unleash the fury that surely is held within its billowing grayness.

Scott Bivens and John Michael Zorko produce some heavy ambient atmospheres, but what do you expect from lead? Sonic surreality with definite meteorological tendencies make music for storms an 8.4 listen... for a rainy day or any day.

Stop by the adastra website for more info on this and other notable releases.

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This review posted August 30, 2000

AmbiEntrance © 2000-1997 by David J Opdyke (except CD cover art, rights retained by original owners).