Rock Symphony
Aether : Inner Voyages between our shadows (BRAZ,2003)****
I vaguely remember having heard an earlier release by Aether, which at that time did not really convince me. Lately I heard a few tracks of the new album on the net and I was pretty surprised how the group sound has evolved so much. The group balance (electric guitars, bass, drums, synthesisers, and voice) and the production is perfect, and there's as much melodic approach as inspiration.
The album is a kind of symphonic rock opera documentary of an inner vision, about some metaphysic questions live brought forth at a meeting point between life and death.
The first part, "Prayer for a new meeting" describes a person, who promised eternal love, dies and prays for uniting with his lover. In this symphonic song we can hear some very nice sounding electric guitar solo's with accompanying group. The second track, "the gate" musically continues in the same vein, with also some quickly played organ parts. It is about making choices of creating materialistic and spiritual goals and deeds, leading to transformations. Musically we can hear this subject through counterparts in the descriptive melody lines. The third track, "Forgiveness" is a more quite symphonic ballad, with a flair of "regret" and need to gain solutions and salvations of things that might not have worked immediately together at first ; the idea of seeking openings leads also to more open musical structures.
The next track, "Scenes of wondering about" is a hopeful song, with nice melodic progressive accompaniment, and further on some string arrangements with dialectic and dramatic instrumental parts, by contributor Glauco Fernandes, a classical and progressive strings player,also a member of the Brazilian Symphonic Orchestra - OSB, who recorded 12 channels with acoustic violin(s) and 5 channels with cello(s), thus creating the exact equivalent of an actual small string section. It is about the ability of man to transform and to gain its results after each (kind of) creation and with each solved initiative. It's the spiritual growth included in any work man does, and which is included in every life of man. The track ends with a more sad part, a song, with nice electric guitar solos, with the theme about not knowing why life ends somewhere with death. Death or anything that ends, transforms its limitations so completely that it changes into something unregisterable, the eternal is at the same time a non-existence, as if it never existed.
The next track, "Babel", continues with accompanied electric guitar layers. The theme of the title reminds me of the idea of the inability to describe anything which goes beyond these limitations. What becomes spiritual goes the same time beyond descriptions. "Babel" is actually about the inability, within each personal quest, to be understood completely by and within a bigger group. Each person has to follow their own personal way and rules, even when they are at the same time part of a bigger social process. Only this way they evolve towards more eternal concepts. Going beyond these limitations is at the same time the inability to express it. This is a nice philosophical concept that instrumentally makes very open improvisational structures in the group's sound, while at the same time it also falls back on the rules the group lives in, the arranged structures. The individual expression in a group, a band is a shared consciousness with arrangements, and an individual way, expressed by more improvisational solo outbursts. The first part of the last track is a nice version of "A Night on bald Mountain" by Moussorgsky, an already popular track because it was covered a number of times before by modern musicians. I heard it before by Emerson, Lake and Palmer ('70's), by Pär Lindh, more (late '90's) recently in a symphonic version, and I remember it must have been used even more than only on these occasions. Although this track has more arrangements that seemed like synthesiser at first, it's also worked out well with the band. The second and fourth part were originally composed and performed as "Night Tale", by Fireballet, a Canadian progressive band from the seventies, and has various hints of elements in classical inspiration, and contain really descent craftful arrangements (harp sounds and clarinet ?,..). The extra arrangements and violin solo were done again by Glauco Fernandes.
The third track in between, also used originally By Night Tale, is "The Engulfed Cathedral" by Claude Debussy. This piece in its total is masterly. For the whole concept of the album there has been great care taken. It's one of the most perfect new symphonic releases I heard so far.
