ALCHEMY

I was eager to hear this record with archaic improvisational music on it, but was slightly disappointed. The music is introduced with "Mosaic", being in my opinion a quite weird selection as for the first track, maybe the weakest song of the record. All of the tunes on the album here are improvisational runs for violins, viola, cello, oboe and percussions. This guarantees the aural texture being quite pleasant, but as the orchestra is small and orientation for variations quite minimal, the whole album appears very monotonous. This would not matter if the hypnotics would charm the listener, but on my instance this magick did not occur. There are some quite unconventional scales being used along with some more familiar European melodic note structures, and this album could be seen as medieval Near East and European music interpret through late 1960's psychedelic philosophies. Sadly as the players aren't very professional, though doubtlessly enthusiastic, the string instruments don't always stay in tune, and the improvisations won't always evolve to very interesting directions. An interesting try, the album covers are quite neat also. Liked their "Macbeth" soundtrack more though.