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CYCLOBE, "THE VISITORS"
Anticipated and found were: the visions of beauty in the blindness ofchaos, the sound of confusion to adore, the overlapping of panic intosensuality, and the questioning angels in the shadows. The setting - asubterrenean sunset still from Orphee. So if it's good enough forCocteau then it's good enough for me - listless beauty and all that.What I hadn't anticipated was to find that Cyclobe have embraced evenfurther the peripheral vapour-trails left by Luminous Darkness, theirdebut, and created a stunning and completely unique take on what I callectoplasmic music: it feels like the sounds are leaking out of thespeakers and seeping into the listeners ear-drums. It has taken form,if that's the right expression, and unfolds over the seven tracks of'The Visitors'. Or it could also be the little specks of chaos onlyhitherto peeked at in Sun Ra moog solos, LSD-period Coil, earlyThrowing Muses and The Fall.'The Visitors' is a constantly evolving, shape-shifting work that moveselegantly (or uncomfortably) between a state of grace and the struggleto hold onto that grace. "Brightness falls from the air" makes thisnotion explicit from the outset, the unsettled rumbling giving way hereand there to gentle swathes of melody and hideously warped keyboards.It shudders and vibrates at the same time, and is a devastatingcombination: the celestial is both welcomed and feared. Similarly for"The body feels light and wants to fly"; the sounds are so subdued, thestructure so viscous and arrested, that once it breaks free andactually flies, the listener is tempted to gulp for air.
"If you want to see that nothing is left" wraps its pulsing, subduedelectronic textures around a spiralling string section, each strugglingto overpower the other. In the end though, its the organic, bodilyaspect — the strings — that win. "Replaced by his constellation"literally replaces itself over and over, in an endlessly buildingserenade that could be mounting orgasm or encroaching panic; and whenit suddenly breaks free into a shimmering set of harmonies you realiseit is the former.
The apprehension and threat of Luminous Darkness is replaced by abarely restrained infra-music that seems constantly at the brink ofmetamorphosising onto a new plane that Cyclobe themselves can't forsee.The Visitors vibrates and crackles.
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