An artist whose ambient work is mostly beatific and bucolic impresses by just barely lifting the shround hanging over a blighted cityscape.
The arcing rainbow promise of “Mal’ ovanie Dúhy” is quickly broken on this fulminating opus. Though its sanguine spirit is replicated later on “All Summer in a Day,” life and light seem to have been sucked out of this town. Urban Blues is a fog creeping in from the port, wrapping around buildings and turning street corners. Strom Noir brings us the texture of the city, its concrete and asphalt, without encountering a single citizen. It is a city, he says himself, though otherwise familiar, increasingly feels like something is going to go wrong. Dark alleys and empty lots are fecund with “Naked City” stories in the making.
Yet for all its brick and mortar realism, it roils with dark, jabberwockyian surrealism, too—”‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe…” If anything ever sounded brillig and slithy, this is it. Closing slowly with “V Ohni So Mnou Pod´” and “All Souls (Will Be Born Again),” Urban Blues leaves us suspended in a perplexing perdition, gazing skyward between the skyscrapers but hands and faces smeared in charcoal and a nagging feeling of bearing some responsibility for things going wrong.
An artist whose ambient work is mostly beatific and bucolic impresses by just barely lifting the shround hanging over a blighted cityscape.
Urban Blues is available on Zoharum.
