The best space music ever! Max is up there in space with John Serrie and Steve Roach., December 22, 2012

Lost links is my favorite space album. If you are or have ever been a fan of Music from the Hearts of Space, by Stephen Hill, then you will love this album. Check out hos.com to hear the most recent shows and space music. Max Corbacho has been featured many times, and he is one of the best in the business.

This is a soothing introspective and relaxing album. When you need to be alone, this is the best music to play. It is nurturing and inspiring and healing all at the same time. Enjoy!

Expansive, drifting ambient zones – beatless, minimal. The series of compositions on Breath Stream are smooth, flowing sonic states that fade seamlessly one into another creating an unbroken listening experience. Airy drones and steady velvet washes gently rise and fall in graceful slow motion, the sound thickening into harmonious even tone in places, then dispersing into almost atonal enormity. At times the intensity of the music drops down low as if the listener were increasingly isolated, distant, remote – or perhaps simply more profoundly at rest, wholly immersed and almost motionless. Beguiling effects burble or flutter on the peripheries, little motes and flickers some barely perceived, sonic breezes drifting through the aural space.

MOOD

The most pervasive mood here is one of almost blissful submission – a captivating serenity imbued with a sense of enveloping immensity. The track titles effectively draw together strands of galactic isolation and deeply personal inner experience – The Great Breath, This Luminous Space, No Day nor Night, Pure Being. Max’s music suggests the tranquil euphoria of being suspended weightless among morphing luminous nebulae, warm clouds of shifting colour, beautiful dreams and faintly recalled memories.

ARTWORK

The Breath Stream jewelcase is a deep, dark spacey blue package. Initially the main image appears as a view of infinite space – closer inspection reveals a horizon, one bright spiralling arm laid out like a flat plain stretching away into the distance. Above starlike clusters form further spirals, spirals of spirals – clusters of imaginary galaxies. Similar visuals fill the rear cover – an unobtrusive tracklist hanging in the upper left quadrant – times alongside. The two panel insert opens to display a closer view of the front cover image – here focussed on the foreground – a little like a glass bottomed boat to the universe. Information is minimal – credits to the left a quote from Vietnamese Monk Thich Nhat Hanh to the right – «Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.»

OVERALL

Breath Stream builds upon the solid foundation laid down by Max Corbacho’s previous release The Talisman. Coming now as the eighth release from this rising Spanish ambient star – the new album exhibits a formidable depth of sound unveiled with masterful restraint. Much of the music arose from long improvisational sessions utilising Max’s collection of hardware synths, catching those moments of magic – selecting and arranging the most absorbing passages into unbroken flow. The album is to be the first of a series of digital releases, offering downloads at iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, eMusic and Napster, among others, and, also, full CD quality downloads through the well respected new download platform www.musiczeit.com. Catch some samples at the Musiczeit page.

WHO WILL LIKE THIS ALBUM

If you enjoyed The Talisman then Breath Stream will take you further into the rapture and beauty of Max’s enormous musical space. This is a release for fans of warm, inviting, minimal ambience with the soft sonic density of Thom Brennan, Numina and Steve Roach. No beats – just infinite space – effulgent, dark, rich in colour, perpetually black.

Beatless and rhythmic ambient zones full of shadow and the lush densities of night. Night sounds, night birds, crickets, low sonic breezes – the album opens with a strongly environmental sound. Gradually dense tonal blankets roll in, gurgling effects and low muted impacts, the stillness now stirred up into a slow winding eddy. The serene twilight pools that Corbacho creates here can be silky and smooth, lustrous surfaces reflecting dark tones – but there are obscure depths too, things heaving below in slow, slow swells. The third track ‘The Slow and Wandering Dust’ sees a soft rolling beat gradually creep in – a corporeal rhythm, natural, constant accompanied by waves of heavy saturated tone like the measured breath of deep sleep. Large pots and giant drum thumps provide the basis for another percussive piece on ‘Abandoned Wind’ – slow motion low, lulling, soporific.

This is a rich, liquid smooth world of dark curling colour, oceanic enormity. Tranquil and languid for the most part, yet uneasy shades well up at times, there are desolate spots, lonely and cold, suggestions of ambiguous lifeforms moving somewhere below or off to one side. The organic rhythms lift some tracks into meandering animation, quickening the stillness – but only just.

Purple-black scenery in a crepuscular gloom fills the front cover, the edges of individual rocks and crags picked out with a graphic grey outline creating a weighty solarisation effect. Vague, monochrome geographical imagery creates backdrops for the other panels – a tracklist on the back complete with track times. Inside the two page booklet is an explanation of the project and a verse from Indian poet Sri Aurobindo that was a chance finding during the creation of the music.

Max Corbacho’s Nocturnal Emanations was released in 2003 and appears on the website as the fourth release by this talented ambient composer. This is seventy three minute duration long form work developed through eight distinct tracks. Promotional material describes the album as one of «transparent synthwashes, developing through silent landscapes». The sound zones established are intended to be «almost hostile, sometimes underground, always stony, ancient». The approach taken was one «without any type of synchronism» so that «in this way the layers of synthesizers move freely along the whole piece «rubbing» harmonically some with others. A compelling composition that very effectively leads the emotions and senses in a beguiling night glide over quiet, abandoned terrain.

Nocturnal Emanations is for lovers of sonic scenery, lovers of low light, lovers of ambiguity. This CD will appeal to ambient fans that enjoy an organic sound and powerful atmosphere.

Ambient artists Bruno Sanfilipo and Max Corbacho merge their considerable talents for Indalo, a brooding, eerie, powerful excursion into dark ambient soundscapes peppered with occasional ethno-tribal rhythms, filled with primal sensuality, and laced throughout with palpable mystery and ancient ritual. Use of echo drenched in moisture and field environmental recordings of nocturnal creatures lends the recording a distinct mixture of subterranean and deep jungle evocations, a juxtaposition which works amazingly well and is one hundred percent cohesive. The album opens with the 22-minute title track, a long expansive slowly developing piece, filled with deep rumblings, cavern-like sounds that are both animal and mineral in sonic characteristic and higher pitched whistling melodic drones, similar in character to spacemusic. Percussion, of the type normally associated with ethno-tribal ambient, infiltrates at the midpoint of the track, played with energy and passion amidst rising and falling swells of drones and washes, but the beats don’t stick around long, replaced by warm glowing electronic waves and a scattering of environmental sounds.

Six other tracks fill the rest of Indalo with everyting from burbbling fluid effects (heard at the start of «The Agave emerges on the dry earth») to spacious vast washes and drones floating over deep but subtle thunder-like rumblings to swirling almost oppressive drones counterpointed by organic-electronic pulses on «Lava Atmospheres» to «Cabo de Gata» which begins somewhat calm and placid with rattles shaken on top of the relatively quiet synths, but building into a dense multiple-layered drone that seems to be everywhere all at once. «A lucid dream of strange landscapes» has an air of desert desolation as the night creatures come forth and the air cools from the overpowering heat of the day and the full moon reveals a landscape carved out of rock and sand and cast in dark illusive shadows.

Indalo is not a recording that can be completely appreciated if played in the background where some of this album will come across only as so much drones and synths. The astute listener will either listen to this on excellent speakers in a dark quiet room or at least use headphones to fully absorb the subtle complexity of the mix. Indalo is highly charged with atmosphere and mood, so the more you can immerse yourself in the sounds from this CD, the more seductive you will find the recording to be. At times, the mood of the CD is actually peaceful (such as the majority of the closing track «Signs of former experiences»), albeit not syrupy sweet or ethereal, but rooted in the lack of noticeable tension in many places.

This CD is an easy recommendation to fans of this subgenre (darker drone ambient music) unless the person is so averse to some tribal elements (which are few and far between) that even a hint of their presence would ruin the experience for them. While the CD can be a tad monochromatic at times, as long as you don’t expect it to startle you or invigorate you, you’ll be thoroughly satisfied with this album.

review by Bill Binkelman

Bert Strolenberg, Journalist & Senior editor E-dition Magazine

“Indalo” is the first full-length collaborative effort of these 2 musicians, who made their own music-business by starting ad21 Music. The concept-album is named after an old Andalusian symbol which still can be found in nowadays Spain. In 2001 Corbacho & Sanfilippo made a journey to a natural park in the south of Spain, where they were overwhelmed by strong impressions & strange beauty of the landscape. Later on they decided to transform them into ambient music. Well, the two have done an excellent job: “Indalo” offers a tremendous atmosphere in which vast textures carry the listener away, accompanied at times by sophisticated tribal percussion. It’s equal to Steve Roach in his best days, where the same beauty lies deep within the carefully crafted soundscapes. Both the darker and lighter shades of life seem to meet in this ongoing journey, ranging from cosmic territory before spiralling down to earth again. This is magnificent stuff, one that deserves a high recommendation.

Bert Strolenberg  E-dition magazine