Light Years Italy Vinyl & CDs

Review: Italian composer and modular synth wizard Caterina Barbieri makes a debut on the Light-Years label here with a profound work of ambient beauty. Known for her musical vortexes, she warps space and time with her compositions and has done ever since breaking through with 2017's double-album Patterns Of Consciousness. Spirit Exit again finds her start up her modal rug and get to work in her home studio amidst Milan's two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It's a personal work that "takes inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time." The transportational sounds are as complex as they are emotive from front to back.

Review: Ambient masters Grand River and Abul Mogard team up for the first time ever on In uno spazio immenso (In A Huge Space), titularly touching on the often gargantuan feeling evoked by space ambient, a befitting name to say the least. Here the pair work in and through the genre to produce a full-circle rainbow's worth of expanse and breadth, successfully contrasting a sense of largesse with another, counterintuitive feeling of a world stood still, time having stopped. The six-track album is an impressive, but subtle grand tour of an unblemished, alpine sublime, with the opening intenso-ambience of 'Dissolvi' recalling the work of Ben Frost, and the near-closing 'Sulle barcane' serving as the album's unique denouement, made up of cryptic environmental recordings, static washes and weightless pads.