Morpheus Music

REVIEW OF HEAVEN AND EARTH - DON PEYOTE
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January 2013 Luscious chillout world and dance music. Heaven and Earth elegantly weaves an enchanting tapestry of modern genres: colourful indigenous performance; meandering ambience; gutsy dub and electronica; sleepy global exotica. The range of sonic material is impressive, programmed arps and synthesisers are accompanied by electric guitar, bamboo flute and other acoustic instruments. But there is so much more: from such subtle touches as a single cuckoo and low-key reversed music samples to a soaring female Indian singer with accompanying drones and bows; echoing children's voices; lazy slide guitar and a veritable plethora of electronic effects. The tempo shifts pleasantly throughout the album yet always remaining in the lower bpm range - Dub the Magic derriere tripping along with a meditative dance beat of percolating sequencers and tablas; Crystal Skulls insistently plodding along with a ponderous live drum sound. Intros and outros linger pleasingly in some of the album's more evocative spots and there are plenty of spacious, unhurried interludes where rhythms to fall away into alluring musical clearings.

REVIEW OF TRANZWORLD EXPRESS - PETER WESTHEIMER
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STYLE March 2012 Global psychill journey album. Tranzworld Express is a transporting experience that whisks the listener away from home on a speeding dream train breezing across musical, cultural and technological borders. The pace is mid-tempo - a comfortable dance groove with a locomotive-like regularity suggestive of casual speed and passing vistas. Western soul sounds and club elements get the party going, but soon the scene has shifted and a Middle Eastern dub beat drives Peacedance further from home. The sense of the exotic is heightened as the album progresses: international instrumentation and diverse voices interwoven among bright recording effects, vocoder snatches and lush strings. "I know everything about nothing!" declares a lively voice at the opening of Virtually Enlightened; multinational hand drums and twanging plucked wires here juxtaposed against subtle sequences and brash brass flourishes. Peter Westheimer clearly enjoys a rich melting pot of music without the encumbrance of genre restrictions. China India (as you might deduce) fuses the colours of these two evocative Asian sources of mystique - bells trees and electronica; er-hu and sitar; expressive tablas and programmed beats; piercing pipes and soft female vocals. The binding factor for the album is the relatively consistent beat - wheels on tracks, hypnotic patterns, express rhythm.

REVIEW OF MEDUSAZOA - DAN POUND


STYLE March 2011 Smooth, oceanic ambient electronica. Medusazoa is an album of warm, fluid, mostly beatless synth environments. Drifting pads and velvety drones waft and mass around emergent pulse formations and rhythmic digital fragments. Liquid clicks and flecks trickle against synthetic vibrations or burble alongside repeating motifs; lazy scale patterns meander upward, downward; peculiar disturbances rustle and murmur and there are occasional sussurant flushes of turbulence. A downtempo beat arises midway through the title track, lazy and uncluttered; beguiling watery purring sounds cycling around. Some tracks centre mostly on the ponderous heave of layered drones, the flutter and flicker of rhythmic ephemera deep within. Others have subtle melodic elements: hypnotically repeating motifs; sparse piano phrases, electric guitar touches; these buoyant centres of regularity suspended in sequential tides or wandering afloat through ambient densities.

REVIEW OF GOLD FLOWERS BLOOM MERCURY PETALS - ROBERT SCOTT THOMPSON


STYLE
Graceful beatless ambient instrumentals. Gold Flowers Bloom Mercury Petals is a suite of interconnected compositions that flow smoothly from one to another with slight shifting transitions. The variation from track to track is subtle and at times almost imperceptible - yet each piece progresses the journey further from its origin passing into passages of fluctuating harmony and atonality, moments of gathering darkness and emergent beauty, transient lightness or deep wells of intensity. The collected compositions all benefit from an oriental sensitivity, sparsity and classically delicate touch. Many of the tracks feature flowing drone beds and swells of smooth synthetic tone either underpinning minimalist melodies or themselves embodying the focal forms. A restful oceanic heave is the most pervasive rhythmic device, rising and falling allowing the more buoyant elements to drift idly with the tides.

REVIEW OF ETERNAL NOW - DON PEYOTE


STYLE
Drifting, floatational ambience with a consistently exotic air. The seven tracks here were initially recorded as one long piece, the continuous flow later being marked off into distinct sections. As a result the overall impression is one of almost imperceptible shifts morphing a single thread into varying forms. Soft beds of tone and delicate drone hazes form inviting atmospheres wherein the rich, sonorous chimes of beautiful brass and crystal singing bowls echo and ring. Many of the metallics appear to have been struck with soft beaters, their padded knells muted and mellow. Deep vocalisations join the mix in places, the layered reverberations of overtone throat singing by Tenzing Tsewang smoothly rising and falling into an almost steady sonic state. Subtle effects ebb and flow on the edges of perception, bringing further variety to the music. Apparently Eternal now was composed and recorded in just 3 weeks - which says Don "is a record time for me !!"

REVIEW OF HERE FOR NOW - SEVENTHSWAMI


STYLE
Downtempo glitch-hop instrumentals. This is firstly an album of impressive, powerful rhythmic structure - the confident breaks and hiphop beats here are inventively developed by some very dynamic complementary musical effects - a dazzling array of crisp synthetic phrases, zappy effects, bass throbs and acidic squirts of tone. Melody is very much secondary, often terse, muted or carried by buzzing or sharp tones, and frequently placed deep within the mix. Yet the pithy phrases and melodic forms that for the most part dance unobtrusively among the grooves at times gather into stirring beauty as on the orientally flavoured Forever You Forever Me or the somewhat wistful Serpiente Cosmica. Vocal elements are employed frequently almost as instrumental touches; snatches of speech, repeated transmissions, beatbox percussives, murmurings, philosophical musings and even one complete song courtesy of Souleye. Ethnic hints arise in places, guitar lines, global beats, sampled wavs - all chopped, distorted or digitally enhanced to jerk into place.

REVIEW OF ... AND SO IT GOES - KAYA PROJECT


STYLE
Lush global fusion instrumentals and stirring international songs. The third album from Kaya Project deepens the multinational sound tapestry and instrumental juxtaposition that has been a hallmark of much of Natasha Chamberlain and Seb Taylor's music. Male and female vocals in various languages lead a number of tracks - not sampled - full songs performed with a passion and feeling that sample montaging often fails to deliver. Other vocal performances are wordless - wavering Asian utternaces, gentle oohs and aahs and Middle Eastern soaring. Indeed this whole album has a more organic feel than before, more acoustic instruments; guitar, slide guitar, flute, clarinet, classical Indian violin and Arabic mowals fused with tribal percussion, breakbeats and Gypsy jazz. The clear twangs of wires, the soft thuds of hands on drum skins, heady flute breaths, jangling shakers, expressive piano and clarinet lines - all are subtly buoyed up on almost transparent electronic structres. The effect is well picked up in the cover art - warm and expressive, transportational and engrossing.