Tag: denovali

Review: AUN - Alpha Heaven (2013)

It’s been a few years since I got to know Cana­dian duo AUN (Julie Leb­lanc, Mar­tin Dumais) from their album Black Pyr­amid on Cyc­lic Law. Com­pared to that album, Alpha Heaven feels a bit less dense, with less focus on heavy drones, and more on open spaces, although both are still present. The main chunk of this album is extremely pleas­ant and mostly calm. More so than pre­vi­ous works, Alpha Heaven seems to have some­thing of an outer space set­ting for me, which is of course stim­u­lated by some of the titles, which sug­gest celes­tial bod­ies and explor­a­tion.

Review: Witxes - A Fabric of Beliefs (2013)

Witxes’ debut album Sorcery/Geography almost made it to our list of last year’s favour­ite releases, and now, after not too long a wait, we’re treated to a strong fol­low-up album. It’s the first release on new label Den­ov­ali, and it coin­cides with a rerelease of the first album bear­ing the same new imprint. In short: that’s two double LPs worth pick­ing up.

A Fab­ric of Beliefs starts off a bit slow, per­haps, with the tri­part­ite “Through Abraxas”, but these tracks do show that com­poser Maxime Vavas­seur still has a firm grip on his elec­tron­ics, drones, and some chug­ging rock parts. The buildup is very good, and it works towards a pretty dark cli­max, which is beau­ti­fully off­set by the bright and shim­mer­ing acous­tic gui­tar of “The Strands”.