ojdo

I will start my (hopefully long and prospering) series of music reviews with a very unusual piece of music, considering that it is released at Kahvi, a Netlabel for electronic music.

It is unusual because this album consists purely of orchestral and piano music. Both technical and musical quality are astonishing. In total, it sounds like the O.S.T. to a film playing in Siberia. Don’t evaluate this album based on the performance on laptop-speakers. This music needs headphones or real speakers to not get destroyed by distortions. On my laptop it sounds awful…

Tracks

1. Red Winter Rhapsody 1 is a great appetizer which introduces all of the instrumentation besides the piano. In the beginning, strings are accompanied by brass to build up the “opening scene”. After a calm down, the main theme is introduced. ★★★★
2. Red Winter Rhapsody 2 sounds more frozen. Dark sounding strings, sometimes dissonant. ★★
3. Red Winter Rhapsody 3 produces much tension at the beginning. It would well perform in a X-Files soundtrack. ★★★
4. Remembrance is short solo piano interlude. Not to remarkable. ★★
5. Winter is cool, erm… cold. Vibrating string sounds create a landscape of snow. ★★★
6. Empyrean again picks up the pace featuring strings over timbals. ★★★
7. The Lonely Birch Tree is a calm, sad, solo piano track. ★★★
8. Air Castle is still piano-only, still very calm. Just the mood flips over to an optimistic cold sunday morning feeling. ★★
9. Blue Lizard makes me think of a sunrise. A simple piano pattern is repeated over and over while strings evolve a spheric sound shape. ★★★
10. Endguitar is the album’s highlight: a melodic guitar riff evolves slowly over time. Just before it gets boring, other instruments set in to give the harmonies more punch. Highly enjoyable, bad with 3 minutes this track is too short. ★★★★
11. In The Mirror continues the unharmonious suspension theme from before. In the end, it switches over to 40 seconds of harp play which confuse me. ★★
12. Jokers Waltz would fit a musical adaptation of Batman on ice: very strange and gloomy while being interesting to listen to. ★★★
13. Quiet Minds features no rhythm but slowly evolving carpet of sound. ★★★
14. Lizi is a light guitar and piano duet. ★★★
15. Waltz Of The North is the bright version of Jokers Waltz. ★★

Question to the reader: How terrible do you find my “review vocabulary”? After re-reading it sounds to me like a failed text composition test.

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