Phelios - Astral Unity (Malignant Records)

The title is deinfitely accurate, as this is real astral music. You can feel yourself floating through the cosmos, the flourescent nebulae on the horizon already billions of years old as you perceive to view them at the moment they have ocurred as the tribal drum rhythm beats in the distance. This album opens up with "Cold Unity", a track that immediately reminds me of some of the "Dark Side of the Moog" series albums with it's surreal tribal beats and spectral synth. I begin to expect more of the Fax label sounds when "Cloud Sector Beta" comes in and suddenly I'm star traveling and floating against the ceiling of the room looking down at what is actually my body. My skin turns cold and then every pore opens up to breathe as the microhairs on the dermal surface stand electrified by the shock of pulses raging throught the circulatory system underneath in response to this sound. That is only the beginning....

As you go deeper into space, you are surrounded and hugged by warm cosmic dust and then chilled by various radiation and distant solar winds. Everything is black one moment an then instantaneously becomes an astral sunset with glittering and flickering particles of light and psychedelic acid spirals of galaxies. The bright fractal patterns spin and rotate as you move through them into another freezing cold and black empty plane in the vacuum that is space.

Symphonic space music is what this stuff is. So magnetic that it actually pulls you out of your consciousness and reality and transports you into an experience that only math and some psychedelic guru can describe to you. This music will convincingly hypnotize you into levitating and leaving your known world behind. With so much of the throwing around and abuse of terms like ethereal and esoteric, it's still almost painful to fight using them to describe Phelios becuase they actually belong here. Imagine Carl Sagan's writings brought into sounds as you are pulled across the astral plane and witness the dawn of the universe approach you as you feel the almost massaging tug of black holes as you pass in and out of their gravitational reach. Finally Einsteins relativity is one of the only things that makes sense and nothing that ever did before does now.

Definitely a magnum opus in the realm of ambient and fits in nicely with Tangerine Dream, Robert Rich, Peter Namlook, Alio Die, Steve Roach, and Mathias Grassow to name a few.

Essential and monumental!!!!

http://www.phelios.de/