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Reviews

Amir Baghiri / Brannan Lane — Lucid Circles
(Brannanlane Music BLCMUS508CD, 2003, CD)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2003-02-01

Lucid Circles Cover art

This collaboration pairs these two veterans of numerous ambient and electronic projects. While Baghiri contributes synths, ambient guitars, sequencer, percussion, and field recordings, Lane plays synths, sequencers and additional percussion (both live and sampled), and mucho post-processing. Most of the material here is of the free floating type, fragments of drifting melodic color and textures carry the listener into deeper levels of consciousness, with the incidental (in some cases almost ambient) percussion acting like guideposts along the journey. The fifteen-minute “Mystic Gardens” merges a world of dark floating drones with random sampled sounds, resulting in something of a peripheral experimental soundtrack feel, as wafts of tonal color float in and out of the picture. Much of the material here often seems to approach the direction of Lane’s earlier Sleep Cycle, especially the shimmering closing title track, though a couple of loud tribal percussive outbursts at certain points in the overall program make it quite unsatisfactory as accompaniment for slumber (unless one likes to be woken up every twenty minutes or so). “Petroglyph” is one of those percussive moments, with a looped frame drum sequence sharing space with other random percussives and textural etherealities; similarly, “Rites of Passage” is driven by a repeating sampled drum pattern as it powers through a swamp of swirling of sonic textures. In all, this collaboration with Baghiri counts as one of the more explorative projects in Lane’s catalog.

Filed under: New releases, 2003 releases

Related artist(s): Brannan Lane

 

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