Customer Reviews

King Beneath the Mountain

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The King Beneath the Mountain is beautiful without being sappy or wistful. Its awash in guitars and large sound scapes.
It is great atmosphere music while being complex and deep enough to listen closely to over and over...

Superb atmospheric transcendent, krautrock-influenced 21st century space rock, would be the best way to describe this first of two (so far) piece of work by Surface Of Eceon. Know I've seen their name before. Tunes here that'll your hairs standing on end are the wailing opener "The Open Sea", "Grasshopper King" and the sixteen minute tripping "Ascension To The Second Tier". Should likely appeal to loyal followers of Bardo Pond, Abunai!, Windy&Carl, Kinski and possibly Flying Saucer Attack. Simply a must-have.

Spacemen 3, Eno, Kinski, Krautrock, Pink Floyd in their spacy early stage: these all can be tasted by those sampling this instrumental mix of ambient beauty and sinister tension. Well-crafted, varied in textures and rich in detail of sounds layered and sequenced slowly and inexorably: this is intelligent music too loud to chill by, too complex to dream by, but just right to think by. This and their second album showcase this enigmatic collective's talent, and I only hope that more of their music makes its way to the surface.

No stranger to building a track patiently and organically from a relative sense of quiescence to a sustained, explosive release, Yume Bitsu's Adam Forkner moved outside of the confines of that group in 2001 to record with three-fourths of the personnel from kindred band Landing, whose levitational, buoyant, tonally elongated wash of guitar-driven droning created a sense of floating ambience. A space-rock supergroup of sorts, Daron Gardner, Aaron Snow, and Dick Baldwin united with Forkner and drummer Phil Jenkins to form Surface of Eceon and release "The King Beneath The Mountain" , a CD that with mostly positive results blends their divergent approaches toward managing tempo and ambience together to create a work of often stunning beauty.

Sounding heavily resonant, a percussive, pulsating bassline intertwines with the chiming intervals coaxed from a rhythm guitar and quietly insistent, almost stacatto drumwork to produce Landing's trademark levitational effect approximating buoyancy within the first few bars of "The Open Sea", which is a highly appropriate motif in consideration of the title. The music ebbs and flows in overlapping waves as a sense of dynamic tension is gradually built until it reaches an explosive crescendo with a saturative, delayed guitar line winding its way out to climax like a hurricane sucking the uppermost level of moisture from the warmer waters of lower latitudes.

"Silence Beheads Us" succeeds "The Open Sea" and its subdued, reflective nature owes much to Landing's occasional tendency to create a floating bed of slipstreamed ambience owing little to signature features that are universally associated with typical song structure. "Deep Grey Night" combines the fluid, bouyant progression of Landing's slo-core tempo with the chiming, multiplicative fretwork making its way up and down the scale in a levitational fashion employed by Forkner with Yume Bitsu, twingling synthesizers seeming to replicate the revolving chirrups of insects in an un-mowed clearing that is slowly being overtaken by mist hours before dawn.

Both " The Grasshopper King" and " The Council of Locusts" open with aggressively swirling, heavily modulated guitars that swarm together, again an appropriate leitmotif when the titles of the tracks are taken into consideration. Both work their way to an explosively onrushing climax, borrowing again from Landing's texturally hypnotic drones and the heavily distorted, ever-expanding crescendos favored by Yume Bitsu.

"Ascension to the Second tier of the Outer Plane of Dryystn" closes out "The King Beneath The Mountain" an epic 16-minute cut so languid and hypnotic that it never seems to take that much time to elapse, rising from a level bubble to a subdued crescendo, mixing together a flurry of notes wrung from the fretboard of one guitar like heavy beads of sweet moisture along with a chiming, heavily textured drone until a third enters like a bristled discharge of revolving electricity at heavy amplitude.

"The King Beneath The Mountain" is a contemplative, mystical, imaginative release, not only for expanding the universe containing the mythos of Dryystn, but for its organic counterbalance of rich, evocative ambience and explosive release, made all the more impressive because this recording was the product of almost total improvisation. Anyone who's ever owned a CD by Landing or Yume Bitsu should have this one in their collection as well.