THE SANCTUARY SUITE

This musical project called Cauldron brings us four ambient like tracks. "The Sea / The Road" opens the album with aural landscape with whale voices and deep sound textures. Later a bluesy solo guitar joins the sound wall. With the ethereal synths appearing later, the music reminds slightly later Pink Floyd or some kind of new age music. I have to admit, though this sounds pretty, the album appears however quite boring. The guitar solos are not very interesting, just bluesy pickings stretched too long considering their content. As the guitar vanishes on the first track, there are some subtle noises introduced to the aural realm. When the guitar later returns, it brings bass, some synths, accordion and some mechanical rhythms within its wake. I must admit that this change does not alter the song finding more interesting or mystical straits. As the sea soundscapes dissolve, the rest of the track is sadly very boring. "The Cathedral" begins with a low bass drone and the same bluesy solo guitar. There's also soloing with very bad sounding modern synth sounds. After few minutes there's a monotonous beating added as a rhythm element. Almost nothing happens during this track, but there are some pretty sitar chords in the end of it. "The City" has a layer of church bells and bass pulses, upon which the sitar plays. That instrument sounds very nice, and I would have appreciated this record much more if it would have replaced the boring electric guitar, and that the poor sounding synths would have been omitted. Sadly they try to haunt also this track in the middle of it. "The East / The Dream / The Bliss" begins again with similar sitar picking as previous track, this time the church bells are just replaced with a waving low synth sound. For next ten minutes, there will not be any evens in this tune, until the sitar fades away after ten minutes, and is replaced with trumpet.

I was disappointment by this album, as the minimalist elements which build it weren't very pleasing in my opinion. I would suggest this record for fans of eventless ambient music. The other player Jens has been part of a Swedish psychedelic band The Spacious Mind, which I would recommend getting familiarized rather than this band.