Source of Present arrives in a richly-hued card digipack of two panels. Cover art, created by Max Corbacho himself, is intriguingly ambiguous and engrossing: twin bands of crystalline light shaft across the front cover in lustrous diagonals, darkness massing around like an enveloping shroud. Purple depths support lilac and ice-blue highlights, each in constant interplay with the other. The rear cover holds track titles, the inner left panel presents relevant credits and website information; simple, minimal, elegant.

This latest album from Spanish ambient master Max Corbacho delivers a highly refined ambient experience. This is serene, floatation music of a sublime nature – delicate, subtle, serene, carrying the listener afar. Tracks range from the twenty three minute forty four second opener The Beginning of Remembering via three shorter pieces, Transparent Phenomena being the shortest at just less than four and a half minutes, to a pair of epics at the end of nearly nineteen and thirteen minutes respectively. Max Corbacho seems to sink his beautiful sounds in ever greater lustre and sheen – the clarity, vibrance and intensity of Source of Present being top notch.

Dear friends and listeners, 
I’m happy to present you Splendid Labyrinths. Following the release of Future Terrain last month, it is the time of the album in which I have worked over the last year and the first months of 2015. I continued my work in the pursuit of purely atmospheric expression, in an attempt to convey this vital experience that pushes us forward in one direction within the labyrinth of life, this way I call The Flowing Path.  Splendid Labyrinths is a deep reflection on our journey through life, change, growth, discovery, movement and transformation at every step along the way. 
Original cover image rendering, design and layout by Michael Rodríguez Pletz www.domestika.org/es/michaelrpletz.
Released as CD (factory pressed), as digital download through the usual stores (Bandcamp, Amazon, iTunes, etc), and through streaming services (Spotify, Rdio, etc). NOW you can pre-order your CD or Digital copy from my Bandcamp store: http://maxcorbacho.bandcamp.com/album/splendid-labyrinths
Official release day is next Friday May 15. 

All the best,
Max Corbacho

Morpheus Music & The Mall Magazine

Beatless, minimal ambient air. As if painting with the sonic equivalent of light, Max Corbacho establishes a deep, resonant, anticipatory expanse and fills it with shafts and shards of shifting colour and density. Broad beams and hazes of tone drift in unhurried solemnity, rising heavenward in weightless clouds or massing gradually into translucent omnipresence. The ponderous large-scale undulations of these evolving, spacious atmospheres are illuminated with lustrous glimmers, sparkles and radiances of a more fleeting nature. Ripples and fluctuations that pass through the weight of the air with faster motion. There is a reverential dignity to this music that beautifully captures something of the architecture and luminance of the cover imagery; this graceful lustre, this art of light.

Ars Lucis comes in a jewel case with a two panel insert. Imagery is centred on a series of photographs of the Basilica of St Denis in Paris, France. Elegant grey columns and arches are presented rising like huge plumes of stone supporting luminous stained glass windows. The glowing blue, indigo and violets hues of the tinted panes beam all the brighter amid the starkness of stone. The front cover opens out into a two page panorama where the imagery is allowed to glow without distraction. On the rear cover track titles are set out alongside timings for each piece. The flip side of the insert once more gives much space to the glorious visual impact of the abbey church with information displayed to the left: production details, credits, thanks and website addresses.

Max Corbacho’s ninth album follows the progression into deep, silken ambience set by previous releases Breathstream and The Talisman. The album is released via the ad21 label that Max maintains with kindred spirit Bruno Sanfilippo. Ars Lucis contains seven transcendent compositions that range in length from the eighteen minute seven second conclusion Mirabilis Structura to the two minute fifty one second brevity of Keystone Meditation. In total almost seventy four minutes of sublime melody-free magnificence. If you have enjoyed the direction of Max’s most recent previous albums, then this one will be a joy to you. The Max Corbacho website provides clips to listen to, as does the ad21 website.

Morpheus Music & The Mall Magazine

STYLE

Gliding ambient serenity with hypnotic hand drumming. Max Corbacho’s first CD drifts over the listener like soft sand and silk, weightless wafts and gossamer veils of synthetic tone rising and falling in delicate harmony. The tone is light and dreamy, floatational and airy – atmospheric rather than oceanic, skybound rather than subterranean. The percussive content is confined to the first four pieces – here gentle loops comprised of organic beats with an ethnic flavour roll round evenly, trance-inducing, repeating until a part of the fabric of the environment. As the album progresses the introspective nature of the music increases – the beautiful Erosion lulling and spacious leading into the final three beatless tracks. The shadows pull in somewhat toward the end, Vestiges opening with a twilight moodiness that seems to open into a clear night – the listener a solitary presence in a vast panorama.

ARTWORK

Desert scenery, blue skies and windswept grass patches support a huge red rockmass transported from elsewhere. The craggy surface is engraved with an enormous square spiral – a hint of tribal mystery, a futuristic symbol calling to the distant past. The rear cover holds another desert scene where track titles and credits sit in a lightened oblong panel. Inside a two page booklet opens out to extend the front cover photograph – track titles fading into the picture at the far left. The innermost panels are black and white – another desert, pale and drained forming a backdrop to an explanation of the project.

OVERALL

The artwork on Vestiges intentionally places the album in the desert ambient genre – a style that Max Corbacho develops with considerable skill. The album was produced, written, performed, recorded and mixed by Max Corbacho, at Max´s Studios in Sabadell (Barcelona) in 1998. Released on Freerecords, the CD consists of seven mid-length tracks around six to eight minutes each totalling 53 minutes 54 seconds in all. This album will appeal to anyone looking for something buoyant and expansive with tribal beats and smooth synthetic polish.