dw079 - Igor Karaca - Rituelle

Blood1000 (c) 2011
Rituelle by Igor Karaca is a dark ambient album featuring six tracks over 1 hour. This is a cool album because it keeps the same theme alive throughout the performance. Released by Darkwinter, the album is described as an ambient soundscape (and more) allowing the listener to venture into astrophysical phenomena. But it is much more than that.

First of all the album picks you up and drops you somewhere strange. ‘Comfort Zone’ comprises a ritualistic begining showcasing bird song, echoing gongs, and the gradual introduction of other avian sounds. A build up of intermittent dreamy drones overlays this – all lulling you, wrapping you up, carrying you along. A repeating high drone appears as the track continues to build up, then an alarm – a warning. The track gradually becomes darker and darker, reaching a plateau. The ritual has completed and has transported you from a comfortable space to somewhere quite different, but it’s OK, as you have some time to acclimatize yourself…

The title track ‘Rituelle’ incorporates water sounds, piercing tones and low drones that are quickly replaced by a (processed?) voice (I’ve no idea how this sound is achieved so feel free to educate me). Ominous deep synth sounds repeat rhythmically and form the backdrop for a steely atmosphere through which the water begins to flow once again. The sound of the water flowing eventually dries up and prepares you for the next track, ‘Deserts’. The name of this track put me in mind of the trinkets and adornments that you might find on people and beasts of burden – cymbals or small bells accompanied by rising drones that pop you into an area where the sounds are echoing around you. There is even an incoherent chanting, suggesting a temple ritual or similar.

In ‘Reflection’ an industrial dark ambient style comes to the fore. This track definitely conjours strange places in the mind’s eye. For me, the best and darkest track on the album, it becomes heavy and intense – sable ermine to wrap around the ears – before levelling out and settling into a nice slow but steady pace.

Two more tracks transport the listener further into this strange realm. Experience breathy and ominous atmospheres and desolate spaces before the album ends with a final collection of sounds merging and falling apart, rising and falling.

The album works as a whole. Some albums are a collection of tunes and some work to create a single entity and this falls into the latter category. I think Rituelle is something that is best appreciated when listened to in its entirety. Overall, it is a dark affair and several times the music draws your attention and folds you in. The ritual theme is maintained throughout – cymbals, gongs, chanting, the flow of water. It also has a beginning, a middle and an end: you feel as though you have travelled somewhere and that your journey has been an education..


Cultural Flow - kultur (c) 2011
The USA based Igor Karaca, a Bosnian pianist of classical music and jazz composed with “Rituelle” a long-form ambient exploration featuring muted, long-echoing, cloudy notes, fading from tonelessness into tone-clusters. This is a soundscape for contemplating exotic astrophysical phenomena: interstellar clouds, cosmic background radiation, and the musical event horizons of mysterious black holes.


Sounds Behind The Corner - Nicola Tenani (c) 2011
Bosnian born but now lives permanently in the United States, Igor Karaca is a musician has a background formed about eighty-eight keys of the piano, graduated in Sarajevo at the'Accademia musical'ha the time the first student wanted in Ohio (not you never stop studying and learning) then a teacher.

Igor is currently teaching at the State University'Oklahoma but when you are musicians, it is in the veins and the blood flowing to the fingertips, despite the'angustia of capillaries, which causes a sharp itching quiet only when hands meet the keys of a piano, the holes of a flute, the sticks of a battery, a pick, the keys of a brass, if you are musicians.

Commonly has seen his music scores written in jazz or free jazz, improvised sporadically, but already had movies and documentaries'hanno the author of soundtracks, listening to "Rituelle" will understand the great figurative force of sound.

What is this meeting between the'artista and Dark Winter?

A label surrounded by sounds rather dark and a dedicated musician often playing music, and jazz, but mocking all''anima satisfied, if he can, painting a sound that wants to convey his emotional growth in a given time, one in which, to eyes night sky, can contemplate the dark but once studded with gems from the cosmic, stars.

In similar situations since dall''antichità priests, prophets, musicians, poets have stopped in the same way their mind trying to give the film a voice, sound, color and the sensation experienced is then reductive circumscribe areas simply dark-ambient " Rituelle "because before it opens to a nature that is the daughter of the cosmos far but not so remote.

Life exists and we are simply stellar dust, but if you pass just for a moment that we are the'idea rather something enormously big, why do it every time, we still have the right and opportunity to live among sounds generated by Nature. Amandonico minimal component we show that even larger engaged as we should, in the elements.

First "Comfort Zone" and then the same "Rituelle" will adorn the singing of birds, the runoff of lively'acqua keeping alive a long sound, extensive, designed to relax, nourish dormant chakras.

Classicisms redundant sequences and reverberated oblianti before dell''arrivo a black cosmic sound, life goes on small, then and only then, the'immensità, the dark ruler reigned dall''assenza the sky of the Sun, becomes distress because they fear that with drones stable "Desert" and "Reflection" embrace many other musicians lost in the attempt to give sound to these emotions, sounds like the elongated distances of galaxies, like a sky dotted with archaic, small notes, though small lights you want.

"Tears Inside" is disquiet: distant presence, distorted vocals and witch are potential enemies in an environment no longer so attractive.

I always like to see it as un''allegoria: the sun becomes dark forest at other times, the trees hidden pitfalls but the same goes for the heart, mind,'Es Freudian Thanatos the archaic back as regression, instinct crowds .

The witches are materialized first in the mind and the sound of "Tears Inside" is the realization of what in, at times, it becomes uncontrollable.

Happy listening, possibly in the dark, just a candle, nothing more.

(Translation by Google Translate)








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