SONAR & DAVID TORN: VORTEX

To the Swiss band SONAR's music is attributed the notion of "mathematical music". To be even more precise, I would rather say that this is a geometrical music, sometimes asymmetrical, that it seems like reconstructing Euclidean theorems in a multidimensional spaces. Their last album, "Vortex", is benefiting from the collaboration of the futuristic guitar hero David Torn. His contribution brings up a colorful pitch drop of rockish flavor upon the Sonars sound of polyrhythm landscapes. The relationship between these guitar triangle (Stephan Thelen, Bernhard Wagner and David Torn) embroider a fluid dialogue of a melodic trigonometry which merge into hypnotic and magic dough sound. This sheaf of guitars is sustained by the rhythmic section (Christian Kuntner ? bass and Manuel Pasquinelli ? drums) in a Crimsonian discipline of controlled chaos. The aesthetic vision is very much alike the "dark" genre, but it just constitutes itself in the elements which the death-metal rock bands are missing: finesse, elegance and coherence.

The sonar geometry of the tunes on the "Vortex"album is alluring you like a swirl with complex rhythms in a minimalist format, with overlay levels of bunks of melodic constructions. David Torn's solo guitar parts vibrates and screams with a sensuality, dissonant at some points, congruently merging into the isometric passages of Stephan and Bernhard guitars. The guitar dialogues of these last two are like parallel mirrors, sometimes deformed, other times integrated in this mathematics of sound. Regarded in a whole, "Vortex" is a journey into unwonted sound spaces, ingenuously and mathematical rigorously built in an unitary form. A vortex like an ecstatic trance produced by a Dervish dance.

I believe that "Vortex" is an album Pythagoras would have liked it too.

4 stars all the way!