Respected Electronica artist, Mark Tamea provides this review on 4 October 2007. Explore Mark Tamea's work at www.virb.com/marktamea and www.tamea.org I am indebted to Mark for this review.
Karelia is an album composed of two parts, the title track itself, and a second companion piece, Narocz.
.Karelia is a drone-based journey. A slowly ebbing, slightly foreboding but yet compellingly inviting tone undulates as if an audible representation of a gravity wave. This tone is constructed from deep, yet empty space, and is the medium which supports the further activities unfolding within this framework.
Cold strands of channeled harmonic threads are piped out into this vacuum, ringing out as if the remnants of signals broadcasted from a long extinct source. The sound is magnitudinally empty, as all good universes should be, and gives the distinct impression of incomprehensible cosmic distances.
My mind references side one of Eno's Apollo (for those of us with vinyl copies...), but then Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey comes along and just kicks that out... This is edgy work, slightly scary, stringing me along by my own curious intrigue, leading my imagination across the blackness because I need to know whats out there. Play this in your own comfortable darkness.
Narocz is perhaps the sound of arrival. Here the drones are replaced by softly shimmering metallic cascades, supported by waves from a warm glossy sheened wind. It's an auditory lifeform, and the seductive sound that it emits begins to draw me further into its belly. I'm slowly being swallowed into a swamp of alien chatter, enveloped, assimilated, perhaps digested, but with full consent. It feels too good to try and back out.