Faru - Utasava

Pete Namlook used to coin many of his recordings of electronic impressionism as “new environmental music”, the meanings of which are simultaneously vague and genre-defining. Perhaps no better example of that legacy is the Carpe Sonum debut by Faru. Right from the get-go, the fifteen minutes of “Walk to Sri Pada” situates the listener in dense thickets of sound, a misty mountain hop of far-off Tibetan bells, vibrant crickets, the cooing of massed flocks of birds, and an ominous rising thermal of synth that begins to enshroud the horizon in a great peal of oranges and reds. It’s a strange psychedelic trip wherein you become one with a half-recognizable, half-alien landscape that changes affectation and characteristic with the gait of nearly-imperceptible tiptoes, a faux-Amazonian rainforest cooling the humid paleolithic climes of a far-flung extraterrestrial satellite. “The Sacred Mountain” isn’t any less vivid in its mythological imagery, though now we glimpse the vistas of makeshift lands through the squinting eyes of new gods, their reverberating chorale conjuring the ancestral pasts of Popol Vuh, Alio Die, Paul Avgerinos, and other denizens of epochal eventides long ago swept away. Vast, unchained music that is as spiritually rich as it is brazenly widescreen, fleet, far-out, and golden-eyed.

Tracks

1. Walk to Sri Pada
2. The Sacred Mountain
3. Indian Ocean
4. Makar Sankrati
5. Mirissa
6. Summer Rain
7. Along the Coast