Divination – Akasha

A double CD comprising two very different, yet symbiotic agendas. The first disc, an ambient album, is perhaps one of the most beautiful works ever to have entered the world. Four tracks which relax the listener, puling you deeper & deeper into the seductive warp & weft folds of it's construction. "Descent" by BILL LASWELL (who holds responsibility for realisation of this album) charms you with it's simple tune set against an almost New Age setting, lulling you with warm waves like the caress of a gentle lover. "Rain Dream" by HARUOMI HOSONO creates an even smoother, even warmer floatation tank drift of sound, a changing, smooth drift of dream-smoke which flows over you and saturates every pore, an intoxicating opiate of edgeless sound. "Ascesis" by ANTON FIER is the next velvet-soft zephyr to undulate along the Tympanic canal, hardly bending the cilia in it's age. Warm humming waves with female harmonies like your favourite wet dream carry you on a journey through a landscape so wondrous it's almost cruel. MICK HARRIS concludes the journey with "Stir", a lighter, more benign driftwork than his own LULL. The mood of this track finally brings the listener to gentle rest, a long, deep, calming final descent. The gentlest lullaby whispered to the infant in the womb would seem harsh to this, a description of silt clouds flowing along a lazy, pristine-clear river bed. The second disc entitled "Rhythm" is a very different beast to the one which shares it's double CD case - "Tangier Space Drift" is a LASWELL journey into post-Break-Beat soundscape - frenetically busy drums, all manner of strange noises, a snake-belly-low bassline and creative scratching by DXT take Drum 'n' Bass to a whole new level - a spatial voyage through driving, colour-saturated, clinically-scrubbed urban soundscapes. "Navigations" by HARUOMI HOSONO sounds so much like that Electro-Beat dance music CABARET VOLTAIRE were doing around the time of the "Body & Soul" album, you expect MALLINDER's voice to gyrate to the front of the mix. Having said which, this is a much more fleshed-out sound, a complicated organism of noise & ideas as compared to the CAB's music which seemed stripped to the naked rhythm, and rather lean on the ideas. One of the countless motifs sewn into the track's fabric is a high-pitched ululation, reminding one of the Native American Indian war cries heard on Fifties / Sixties Westerns - a banshee-like shriek which combines surprisingly well with the Jazz sax punctuations. An adventure through an electronic-painted landscape. The closing track on this disc "Illuminoid Assassin" returns to the Drum'n'Bass theme with a Sci-Fi journey through a series of twisting, turning rhythmic developments, fast, energetic with fragments of Jazz punctuating the autoclaved clarity while various ethnic elements - sounding 100% more natural than any DEEP FOREST / ENIGMA composites. The drums travel through an ever-changing panorama of FX, phasing, flanging, doppling them this way & that as if to test some resident ductility. DIVINATION is quite clearly as much an ongoing project for LASWELL as are both MATERIAL & PAINKILLER, and is as far apart musically from the two of them as they are from each other. This album is both intriguing ("Rhythm") and beautifully relaxing ("Ambient"), and very much a recommended purchase.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.