Alicia Carrera and Donato Dozzy's Maga Circe Musica imprint follows last year's ace Dozzy and Daniele di Gregorio album with a hallucinogenic slush of Tangerine Dream-esque electronics, dubbed soundscapes and grim, low-light ambience from Yves Jates. His discrete consolidations of electronic and classical forms hit the spot if you’re into anything from Emeralds through to Ora Clementi, Madalyn Merkey and Topdown Dialectic. Better known as a motion designer who's produced high profile work under the name Yko, Jates crawls into darker corners on his debut album, mysteriously titled "M". Each track is described as a musical moment and sounds as if Jates is traversing rocky musical terrain, fluxing fluidly from proggy, kosmische psychedelics, into throbbing, dubwise dark ambient and organ drone. As far as first releases go, ‘M’ is neatly accomplished in a way that speaks to its creator’s classical pathos and feel for electronic ephemerality. With a minimalist palette of shimmering synth and organ tones he creates imaginary spaces with a wholly absorbing sense of light and shadow and natural reverbs that effortlessly suspend disbelief. Hand in hand, electronic and classical structures melt into one another across eight iridescent movements variously conveying moods ranging from neurotic to psychedelic, each puckered into chamber-like scenes that feel like AI renders of renaissance imagery. His canvas appears 3D and billowing omnidirectional, craftily lit from angles that encourage listeners to ponder them from all sides, and which lure us into beautifully ethereal headspaces. From the pizzicato spirals of ‘Moment 1’ thru the swaying low register pulse of ‘Moment 8’ he elegantly weaves between hypnotic optimism and reflective states of mind, with passages of sky-kissing bliss turning inward to cloud chamber rumination and more intently future-primitivist metallic plucks, each puckered into concise timeframes that keep the feels shaded in shadowy gradients to a real highlight in the lushly off-colour harmonics of ‘Moment 7’, while the album takes a stark left turn at 'Moment 3', descending into fog and murk and accentuating an atmosphere that somehow connects to Topdown Dialectic’s blunted minimalist dub. It's a varied, cinematic album that treats its wide frame of reference with a lava-like fluidity, offering a set of fractal euphoria and vibe-drenched mysticism.
