Max Corbacho: Echo Of Longing
CD, Max Corbacho, 2019
We already know from another review that Max Corbacho is a Spanish musician living in Barcelona who composes and interprets atmospheric, ambient music for sequencers and analog and digital synthesizers. Anyone who knows anything about these instruments knows that they are constantly improving and maybe that they will sometimes compose and play on their own. Max Corbacho is also trying to do something like this, but I think you will always need a person. We would then get to the ideas of Karel Čapek written in R.U.R. or to the movie Blade Runner.
There are three songs on the Echo of Longing album. The first and third almost half an hour, between them the second about twenty minutes. That is, really long pieces. I feel a lot of influence from Steve Roach, both in terms of sound and construction. So I would put them in the style of dark ambient. It is a flowing flow of the cluster, in which there are no pauses and mostly only imperceptible changes in the form of distance and return of sound, the appearance of a long melodic line, which also disappears to reappear after a while, or enriched. Or another line will develop in the cluster, which is more interesting in terms of sound or urgency. The mood of the song is usually calm, even contemplative, depending on whether soft or sharp registers are used.
You can hear all this in the first song Echo of Longing. After the 20th minute, the sound is more complete in the melodic line and interesting ringing showers of tones appear in places. At the end of the song, the melodic line intensifies to form the main motif.
However, you won’t even notice that everything is moving into the second track, Embryo of Drones. In it remains a shaky, quite sharp drone from the first, but the melody is constantly changing. These are not harmonic, they are individual phrases of the melody. But the sound is still obscured as if it sounds from a distance in space. However, it is not a melody that would develop and go somewhere. It’s more about working with tones. But about halfway through, the song becomes more harmonious. Melodic lines even slide together, the character is spatial rather than spherical. Disappearing, sometimes chanting, as if built on the chaos behind him.
Everything gradually falls silent and the third song The Noble Beyond begins. Here you feel more of the space from the sound of the melody than it would be completed by other drones in the background. Prim has a melody that is again elongated, crystal clear, consecutive. Sometimes additional tones are added to it, but not trying to harmonize it. Rather, a second melody appears that intertwines with it. You can feel the rays falling into the cathedral and shattering against the colonnade. Some tones even sound like wordless singing. It is no longer dark music, but a celebration of light, joy, life. But in the middle of the song, it reminds me of the call of lost souls. I would say that in this middle part it somewhat loses the charge with which it was deployed. It’s the mood of a tired afternoon and this song and the whole album say goodbye to us.
It’s demanding music that has to be listened to intently, it’s suitable, in my opinion, for a film, a documentary about nature, etc., it’s purely ambient.
Review by Jiří Mazánek.
Genre: Ambient music, space music, atmospheric ambient, drone, soundscapes.
2019 | CD | DIGITAL | STREAMING | GO TO SHOP