winter solstice

Returning back with that superb compilation put out by Vanguardista entitled ‘Winter Solstice’ – really is a most impeccable harvesting of talent and something that we briefly mentioned way back here https://marklosingtoday.wordpress.com/2017/11/25/winter-solstice/- an 11 eleven track gathering, which to complete the round up I think we’ll work backwards through the track listing, which means old friends Transmission 13 are first up on the inspection block courtesy of the celestial visitation that is ‘northern lights’. Softly stirred in symphonic swirls, this orbital cortege demurs and dances all the time frosted and stilled in the realms of the airless heavens, its mesmeric murmurs tuned to a divinely graceful pageantry that’s sublimely cut to a silently statuesque sculpturing. The slow to unfurl gem that is casual strangers’ ‘palindrome’ is equally dispatched and flavoured in lunar pirouettes, a kosmische ghost light replete with pristinely dipped in ice cooled flurries of pulsing cosmic pastorals. Spectral night lights spliced in a cavernous dub draped detailing be the order of the day for Ivan Black’s softly majestic ‘Skara Brae Solstice’ for here there’s almost a curiously affecting spiritual radiance emerging from the eerie twilight fogginess pulsing as though a navigational point of light guiding the lost from out of the darkness. Antonio de Braga’s ‘frozen waves’ almost had us of a mind to go rummaging around for our prized Inch Time and Minotaur Shock platters for comparison for we must admit we were taken by the hypnotic glitch ghosted minimalist thaw that’s afoot here which at around the 3.32 mark delicately blossoms from its chill tipped framing into something warmly inviting and cosied in celestial choruses and in so doing retunes it to Manual like frequencies. Second mention this missive / week alone, the out of hibernation New Apostles currently sporting a new album ‘Antiquarian Medical Texts’ usher forth with the alluring dark mystic ‘lonely water’ whose stately and crystalline shadowy settings find them freefalling in to domains of the Church. Perhaps the darkest and grandest moment of the collection, Wolfgang Merx’s ‘second winter’ is steeled in forlorn atmospherics, at once majestic and monolithic, this captivating dark kosmische star emerges from out of the eclipsing shadow of Tangerine Dream, beautifully remote, lonesome and abundantly lush in the bruising spray of opining overtures, immaculate in a word. Which all leaves Guitar PK to bring closure to this essential gathering with ‘Spiral Eye’, which I must admit, viewed in a certain light, leaving aside the Floyd-isms that is, has a certain loose and dreamy feel attaching that would suggest something of a hitherto secret studio face-off between a certain Andy Summers and Vini Reilly. https://vanguardistarecords.bandcamp.com/album/winter-solstice