Kirlian Camera - The Desert Inside

This album kicks straight into action with a track which, while even on a foggy day, you'd never mistake for Techno, despite being built on a strong fastish BPM. Tonally rich & warm, this is unmistakably KIRLIAN CAMERA with it's sweeping sheets of keyboard strings. The vocals - a male voice almost speaking unemotional monotone while the backing female voices range overhead like angels in the background, irresistibly bringing ATTRITION to mind. A slightly damped-down remix appears on track #5 which is nevertheless a strong, hooky track. Track #2 pulls the tempo down a tad, arranging a solid little sequence against simplistic drum pattern. Despite the track's title, this brings ancient dreams from Eastern desert lands to mind - EMILIA's voice weaving mystical mystery against drifting synthetics. As warming and welcome as the softest seduction. Track #3 is a large, black, strange vignette of almost film soundtrack. #4's bright daylight-fresh rhythm plays host for heated electronics & sparse dream-caress female voice which seems to arrive at the place you are from another, perhaps mythical time. Skeletal drums which rattle like boxes of bones are made surprisingly warm by deft hands at the mixing desk. The album closes with a track created out of radio loops & sampled voices, utilising KONSTANTIN RAUDIVE's recordings. Very much an Ambient Industrial piece, it suggests a bleak terraformed mindscape, bereft of focal points to arrest the eye, a flatland which seems to roll away forever. Too tonally warm to be labelled 'Isolationist' it nevertheless rests somewhere between the SYLVIAN / CZUKAY albums & LULL at their most benign - a journey through spartan textures. Maintaining course on the Good Ship Maturity, KIRLIAN CAMERA have come of age. Although brief, this is a well worth seeking out, with a strong opening track & it's later remix version digging hooks deep into the listener. Fulfilling early promise, they have developed their sound into something more than the sum of it's parts. Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.