Review: Lunatic Soul Walking on a Flashlight Beam at Ten

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Walking on a Flashlight Beam turns ten years old on October 13, 2024. This album has a special place in my heart, and I want to explain why. It was the first Lunatic Soul album that was released after I became a fan, but that is certainly not the only reason or even the main one. Of course, what I’m about to say are my personal observations, and you may disagree with me–but you’d be wrong. 🙂

I’m not going to talk about the songs, so if you want to read about those, I have a full review here.

When Walking on a Flashlight Beam came out in 2014, it was almost immediately recognized as something very special in the Mariusz Duda discography by many reviewers and fans. It was the fourth Lunatic Soul release, a solo project which originally was supposed to consist of only two albums (Impressions is an instrumental supplement), but at some point, happily for us, Duda decided to keep the project going.

It was an album that was made during a very dark time in Duda’s life. Personal and emotional issues weighed on him; and when he first went into the studio, things didn’t go well. In order to recapture inspiration, he had to re-adjust his thinking and change the ideas, the approach, sounds and mood. Originally there were to be guest musicians, but he abandoned that idea: only Wawrzyniec Dramowicz remained on drums. There would be much less of the lush orientalism of the first three albums, and much more in the way of electronics. Shifting creative gears worked because this masterpiece came out of it. And it is a masterpiece.

There have been three subsequent Lunatic Soul albums in the decade since, so how does Walking on a Flashlight Beam hold up?

WoaFB is one of those albums in my collection that is of such importance that I cannot play it very often. I feel that when I do play it, I must give it my full attention, to honour it with nothing less than my entire listening presence. I own a few other albums like that, but not many.

For me, it is the most inspired, the most cohesive, the most nuanced, and indeed most intellectual of the entire Lunatic Soul project, and perhaps of Duda’s entire output.* After ten years it has lost none of its power; in fact it has gained stature as the other LS albums have been released. WoaFB reached a pinnacle in terms of flow, vision, and thematic integrity that the other albums did not quite achieve. In the wider context, it pulls the first albums (LS I, LS II, and Impressions) together, and provides an anchor point for the whole project. It is an album that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

There are LS albums that I play more often, that I consider “favourites”: the astonishing Lunatic Soul I; Impressions; and the joyous Through Shaded Woods; but I will state outright that by any objective measures, Walking on a Flashlight Beam is the best. It is a true showcase of Mariusz Duda’s creative powers, an album where all the elements–the music, the lyrics, the mood and atmosphere–came together in a perfect storm of inspiration.

*with the possible exception of “Transition II”, to which I have much the same response as WoaFB but this of course is not an album, and is a bit of an outlier in the LS canon.

There will be much more about this album in my upcoming book.

 

 

 

Music of 2024: Update

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Back in April when I posted the first look at early releases, I mentioned that I have been busy and haven’t had a lot of time to really seek out new music (or old music, for that matter, apart from the ‘old’ music I’ve been listening to as research). That situation has not changed much. Over the summer I focused more heavily on writing my book, so I continued to not hear much new music; now I am back at the wage-earning slog and trying to write my book and …yeah. Even less time.

Still, in the months between April and now I have managed to squeeze in some new stuff, and here’s what I got so far. Up for brief comment this time around:

Albums

Airbag: The Century of the Self

Bent Knee: Twenty Pills Without Water

Elephant9: Mythical River

Bill Leeb: Model Kollapse

Loma: How Can I Live Without a Body?

Oceans of Slumber: Where Gods Fear to Speak

Wretchgod: Suffering Upon Suffering

A few singles from:

Body Count, Klone, Front Line Assembly, Kanaan/Meller, Amplifier

In this post I’ll do the singles. It takes longer to review albums and I’m not done yet. This is not a ranking, but alphabetical order.

Amplifier: “Guilty Pleasure”

A single in advance of a new Amplifier album, apparently called Gargantuan, to be released some time this year. Their last album came out in 2023, and I ranked it pretty high for the year, tied with Riverside’s for the top spot, despite a couple of rather messy songs. The rest were lovely.

“Guilty Pleasure” sounds like one of those messy tracks, wherein everything seems to be happening everywhere all at once, which is okay if you like that sort of thing, but I am not overly fond of it. I like a song that has some kind of recognizable direction to it, or at least  not sounding like it is galloping madly off in all directions (hat tip: Stephen Leacock). This single barely holds it together. Which means I have to wait to hear the rest of the album before I decide to buy it.

https://amplifier.bandcamp.com/track/guilty-pleasure-advance

 

Body Count: “Psychopath” and “F*** What You Heard”, released in advance of their new album apparently called Merciless. This is supposed to drop sometime this year, but so far there has been no word on when.

These are both solid offerings, the first reminiscent of tracks like “Carnivore” and “Here I Go Again” from earlier albums, Ice-T rapping about unrestrained predatory violence: it’s not bad but we’ve already heard it. The second though is a rap-metal monster, political and angry, and I swear the duo of Will Dorsey (drums) and Vincent Price (bass) is one of the heaviest, most thunderous rhythm sections in the business.

 

Front Line Assembly feat. Seeming: “Molotov” (remix)

“Molotov” the original comes from the 2018 FLA album Warmech, which is the OST for the video game Airmech Wastelands. Seeming is an indie/post-punk/industrial duo with three albums out so far: in my blog I ranked their Sol: A Self-Banishment Ritual as the best album of 2017.

FLA has released a few remixes of pieces from Warmech, and I noticed “Molotov” because it is one of the best tracks from the original album, and, well, Seeming. It is remixed to dial back the synths and include lyrics, written and sung by Alex Reed, on resistance politics: “Revolution is not a mood/revolution is not a vibe/…revolution is showing up” he declares. It really works: Seeming skillfully redirect the energy in the original piece and create a powerful new song.

 

Kanaan/Meller: “Olympics”

A joint track between Robert Kanaan, a Polish electronica musician, and Riverside’s (and ex-Quidam) guitarist Maciej Meller, celebrating, well, its title. It is a soaring, melodic instrumental piece with lots of synths, nice guitar, and well-worth the few bucks to buy it on Bandcamp.

 

Klone: “Interlaced” and “The Unseen”

These are out in advance of the new album The Unseen, to be released on November 8th—a bit of a surprise, really, since their previous album was released just last year. Anyway, there is no mistaking Klone, with their orchestral, guitar-rich heavy prog and Yann Ligner’s soaring voice. Both these tracks are strong, the first one featuring a couple of jazzy sax solos, the second getting pretty metal with Ligner almost growling. They bode well for the album, but also suggest we aren’t going to get anything radically new from the band in terms of sound or direction. That is, there isn’t a lot to say specifically about the songs because if you know what Klone sounds like, you know what these tracks will sound like.

As noted, I’ll post up comments on the albums when I have time to finish listening/thinking about them. I did in fact sample more than just this, but so far these I’ve listened to enough to have something to say. Who knows… I may be able to add to the list as time goes on. Stay tuned.

Exciting News!! Something Big!!

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Do I have your attention? 😃

What’s Going On?

The past few months have been very slow on my blog–not, probably, that anyone has noticed, but still…I’ve let it slide. I have not been talking much about new music, because I haven’t been listening much to new music, and there is a reason for that: something else has taken precedence.

 Here’s a bit of context:

A few years ago (well, more than a few, but let’s not talk about how quickly time is passing…), I started a series of posts in which I ranked and reviewed all of Riverside’s studio albums and EPs. I meant to do the same thing for Lunatic Soul but somehow it didn’t happen: this project is of such profound importance to me that I struggle to express how I feel about it. I have written reviews for all the LS albums from Walking On a Flashlight Beam to Through Shaded Woods, but I always felt at a loss when I tried to explain the whole project’s impact.

Then something entirely unexpected happened. I mean, completely out of the blue, I never saw it coming, never in a thousand years would it have occurred to me, all of that.

One day I responded to a text message, and in the middle of the conversation, the sender suddenly said: “You know what I think? One day you should write a book. About Riv/LS, maybe MD stuff. I can help you.”

Continue reading Exciting News!! Something Big!! →

Music in 2024: April Quick View

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 It’s time to update what’s new in music in 2024 that has at least caught my attention (or enough of the attention of others for me to try it).

It’s been a bit slow this year, but I’ve also not been actively looking – several other things are keeping me busy. I’ll save or bookmark something, but it might take a week or three for me to get around to focusing on it, so right now, there is not much here. Anyway, in no particular order….

Continue reading Music in 2024: April Quick View →

Review: Limited Edition of One by Steven Wilson

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Limited Edition of One: How to Succeed in the Music Industry Without Being Part of the Mainstream, by Steven Wilson with Mick Wall. Constable, 2022. 375 pp.

I don’t often do book reviews, but lately I have embarked on a heavy schedule of reading music biographies (for reasons), and this is one of several in the pipeline. Since I’ve reviewed some of Wilson’s solo albums on this site, I figured I’d extend the favour to his book. 

Limited Edition of One is Steven Wilson’s chance to talk about himself in long form, touching on all sorts of topics along the way. The style is informal and accessible, not all that different from long interviews, or articles that he has written: I have no doubt that this is his voice. Apart from his annoyingly persistent habit of using the first-person-reflexive pronoun as a subject pronoun, it is relatively error-free, so there was probably some kind of editorial eye cast on it. There aren’t a lot of pictures, and the ones that are there are black-and-white and relatively low-res, scattered throughout the book. This review is for the paperback.

Anyway, on to the meat.

Continue reading Review: Limited Edition of One by Steven Wilson →

Album Reviews: The Music of 2023

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It is that time once again, when I gather together the music that I have liked over the past year, and give a brief explanation of why I like it.

This year feels like a good year, and that is because most of the albums I’ve included feel like they may just stick around longer than the time it took to get to know them well enough to talk about them. Other of my year-end lists do include entries that never made much impact beyond the listening and inclusion; as much as I thought I liked them at the time, they ultimately made no lasting impression, which is not what I hope for. This year, either the albums are better, or I have made more of an effort to exclude the ones that might be short-lived. Or both. Still, there are a handful at the bottom end of this year’s list that are unlikely to be long-term players, but that do have some good songs, so hopefully I will continue to sample them. 

There are fourteen albums here that represent a relatively narrow set of genres compared to other years. There is a fair amount of prog, or at least a fair amount of music from bands with a proggy reputation, which might be a bit of a surprise if you know me. I do not consider myself a fan of modern prog and do not seek it out, mostly because I find the vast majority of it tedious and entirely predictable. However, there are a handful of bands who fall under that (admittedly rather broad) umbrella who can manage to sound fresh, so I can’t write the genre off completely. A few of them released pretty good albums this year. There is some industrial/industrial-related, some post-rock, and straight-up rock. No metal or post-metal this year, and no oddball genres. 

In terms of the ranking… I’ve put numbers on them but except for the three or four at the bottom, those numbers don’t mean very much. It’s crowded at the top. There are some clear distinctions among some albums, but there are also places where making a choice is largely arbitrary. 

Let’s go.

Continue reading Album Reviews: The Music of 2023 →

Mariusz Duda – AFR AI D Album Review

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Released November 17, 2023

  • Mariusz Duda: synths, keyboards, bass, vocals, all other instruments except
  • Mateusz Owczarek: electric guitar on tracks 1, 3, 4, and 8

Tracklist:

  1. Taming Nightmares
  2. Good Morning Fearmongering
  3. Fake Me Deep, Murf
  4. Bots’ Party
  5. I Love to Chat With You
  6. Why So Serious, Cassandra?
  7. Mid Jorney to Freedom
  8. Embracing the Unknown

 

Back in 2008, Mariusz Duda began Lunatic Soul, a project that was intended to be different from Riverside and showcase another side of his musical identity. Eventually though, these two “musical worlds” (as Duda likes to call them) turned out to be insufficient to contain his ever-evolving musical inventiveness. He created a third, under his own name, for ideas and projects that fit neither Lunatic Soul nor Riverside. At first the MD world was to contain one-off alt/pop songs (and a couple of those have been released), but Duda found himself driven to revisit his first childhood musical love, ambient electronica: and the minimalist, digital Lockdown Spaces project was born.

AFR AI D is the next installment in the Mariusz Duda world of electronica. On this album he addresses current cultural fears and angst (as he did with Riverside’s ID.Entity), but this time focused around the growing dominance of AI in many areas, and the suspicion that many people have of it. It is also the first album since 2018’s Under the Fragmented Sky to include a guest musician, in this case Mateusz Owczarek (Lion Shepherd and guest guitarist on Wasteland) who provides electric guitar solos on several tracks. 

As if to live up to its title, AFR AI D begins with “Taming Nightmares”: we hear hissing, the catching of breath, drones and wails and other unsettling electronic noises, until finally a repeating melody begins in the background. Synthetic percussion, distorted vocals, unintelligible words, and a jazzy, jittery guitar solo towards the end, all of which are clearly meant to evoke the unease and anxiety that the rest of the album will work to dispel.

And that’s the key — from this point on, the album begins to get brighter and more upbeat. Duda’s message is not one of fear and suspicion; this is not music that aims to unsettle. As the album progresses the tracks become less jagged, smoother and less anxious, there are more analogue sounds, small bits of percussion, real piano and bass, and more of Owczarek’s thoughtful, careful guitar.

“Bots’ Party” (the fourth track on the album) was the second single released; despite what the title implies, this is a gentle, cheerful track. It starts with a slow piano melody, gradually becoming more and more programmed and synth-heavy but never losing its serene rhythm, even when it segues into party-time and the rollicking guitar solo.

This is followed by “I Love to Chat With You”, the perfect reminder of the beauty of the human touch, with its gorgeous rolling piano theme and choral backdrop, featuring Mariusz Duda’s voice — heavily autotuned, but soaring and hauntingly delicate nevertheless. It links moments from Under the Fragmented Sky to moments in Eye of the Soundscape. It is a truly lovely song, my clear favourite on the album.

The last track, “Embracing the Unknown”, was the first single, and it was an interesting choice given that it is the longest track on the album, and stylistically it doesn’t really reflect the album as a whole. It is heavier and perhaps less obviously electronic than the rest. However, it is a powerful track and gave us the first chance to hear Owczarek’s guitar contributions.

As noted, the album is named for the fear and suspicion of the rapid proliferation of AI into our lives. And yet AFR AI D is a surprisingly upbeat and optimistic album: Duda seems to be reassuring us that our fears are misplaced. AI is a tool, and will be used, but we will not lose our humanity in the process, or our emotional connections to each other. Mateusz Owczarek provides us with much in the way of that human touch, and Duda’s choice of him as the guest guitarist was a stroke of genius. He certainly has the chops, but more importantly he seems to understand the intent of the album, and he adds a rich, organic reality to otherwise deliberately digitized, synthetic, unhuman sounds. The solos are brilliantly and instinctively right. This album would not be the album it is without him.

When I first got the files, I was a bit worried about the music’s longevity: I do not play Lockdown Spaces material very much any more, and the new album is another offering from that same musical world. I should not have been concerned: AFR AI D is richer, meatier, and more immersive than Lockdown Spaces, while extending the electronic identity of this third musical world. Duda sometimes talks of the “flow” of an album — a seamless weaving together of the songs and the sounds that give an album a satisfying sense of unity. AFR AI D flows wonderfully well: it is an album of clear vision and great confidence. Mariusz Duda, in all his musical worlds, continues to surprise and captivate with his endless creativity and the breadth of his vision.

Movie Review: In the Court of the Crimson King – King Crimson at 50

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A film by Toby Amies

Released 2022

Short Version — it’s okay, very little new or really surprising.

King Crimson is indisputably one of the icons of prog, generally acknowledged to have founded the genre as a full-on recognizable thing with their first album, In the Court of the Crimson King, released in 1969. Robert Fripp of course is Legend, regardless of how you feel about him. The band itself has never really been a band, but more of a concept that fluctuates with Fripp’s fluctuating notions of “band”.

If you have even a passing awareness of the career of Robert Fripp/King Crimson, then there is probably very little in the movie that will come as a surprise. The movie spends its time following the band around, talking to its members and a few of the survivors of the early days. We don’t see a lot of performance or hear a lot of the music (there is lots of noodling/set-up/rehearsal), although there are some really early clips of the first version of the band, which are cool to see. 

The overall aim of the movie seems to be getting various performers to talk about how they feel about Robert Fripp. Fripp has always given the impression of being somewhere between difficult and impossible to work with, and nothing anyone says in the movie changes that. It is one thing to have high expectations and demand the best of your band, but at times Fripp seems to revel in being a deliberate martinet. He also was clearly going out of his way to provoke the interviewer — but I would assume that one would enter into such an exercise (interviewing Fripp) prepared for that sort of thing. The band members (current and former)  appear to either revere Fripp, or have chosen to suck it up and stick with him, suffering through the tribulations of performance for the sake of the ideal that is “King Crimson” — or both. The reasons for putting oneself through the ordeal often remain unclear. Gavin Harrison had very little interview time — it is not clear why. Bill Bruford was interviewed more extensively but in the end he really didn’t shed much light on the workings of the band either. Perhaps everyone was simply treading cautiously. 

There was one moment that did surprise me: Fripp admitted that the first break-up of the first incarnation of Crimson (the departure of MacDonald and Giles) devastated him: he says he offered to quit if they would stay and carry on with King Crimson. At this point in his career it is hard to imagine him doing that, but perhaps at the beginning….

I’ve seen King Crimson twice — once a few years back with what looks to be the lineup we see in the movie, in a suitably formal venue (Massey Hall), and once way back in the mists of time, the Fripp/Levin/Belew/Bruford lineup in an intimate venue, with Fripp sitting close enough to touch (not that I would have committed such a crime). I also saw him as a solo artist, doing his Frippertronics over two nights. The three albums released when the Crimson was at its most spare (Fripp/Wetton/Bruford) are my favourites: Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black, and Red. I can take or leave any of the rest. 

In short, King Crimson has been a musical enterprise I have respected more than I have ever liked. Nevertheless, as a music fan, it is hard to escape Fripp’s reach — even without Crimson, he has been a major force in the prog/ambient world, a part of the music of a large number of other important artists. Love him or hate him, there is no question of his towering importance.

The Music of 2023, July Update

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July Update

It’s a few months and releases later from the March overview, so let’s see what is going on and how the new stuff stacks up. I’ll also take a look at some upcoming albums. You can see what I reviewed earlier in the year, here.

Continue reading The Music of 2023, July Update →

Album Review: Music Inspired by Slavs

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Released April 21, 2023

 Personnel:

  • Kris Wawrzak: basses, sampling, programming, vocals
  • Artur Szolc: drums and percussion
  • Robert Szrednicki: guitars, keyboards, synths, various instruments

 Guests:

Krzysztof Drabikowski; Inga Habiba; Lunatic Soul

Sebastian Aleksandrowicz; Anna Drabikowska; Michał Górczyński; Mariusz Kumala; Dyba Lach; Mariusz Mielczarek; Nadhir; Maria Oldak; Tomasz Popkrzywiński; Kamil Popławski; Mariusz Rodziewicz; Igor Szeligowski; Krzysztof Szmytke.

 Track List:

  1. Furta                                                         9. Chors
  2. Świętowit                                               10. Zachód
  3. Wschód                                                   11. Kupałą              
  4. Swaróg                                                    12. Południe
  5. Mokosz                                                    13. Łada              
  6. Północ                                                     14. Weles
  7. Perun                                                       15. Rozstaje
  8. Trzygław                                                 16. Rod

Music Inspired by Slavs is the fourth offering from the Music Inspired By… trio, who have intermittently been releasing largely instrumental thematic albums since about 1999. The last one, 2016’s Music Inspired by Alchemy, is reviewed here.

As the title suggests, the core inspiration for this album are the various deities of the Slavic pantheon. It is meant to be a musical imagining of a distant Slavic past, before conquest, science, and the imposition of a foreign religion, and the release is accompanied by lavish and detailed notes and artwork. There are eleven tracks related to the gods, organized somewhat geographically, interspersed with short, directional interludes to guide us. And so we pass through “Furta” (The Gate) into this lost world.   Continue reading Album Review: Music Inspired by Slavs →