Life Garden - Caught Between The Tapestry Of Silence & Beauty Album

This is a very unusual album, varying from complex to simple musics - an easy album to listen to, but more demanding to analyse.
It opens with the epic amorphous track "Varikara", a l5'45" long piece of non-beat, non-shape music, a drifting, shimmering, chiming, humming cauldron of sounds, mostly with an Eastern feel, given voice by it's sustained sitar sound, humming didgeridoo soundalike which fades in & long-decaying gongs, among a myriad other sounds. How can something of this length be analysed in a handful of words - not easily. For Instance, it seems random, yet somehow there's a leaning towards form, a gelling of sounds to form shapes, borderline fractal images ripped into fragments then reassembled. "When The Lion Licks The Sun" opens once more on a sort of Ethnic shimmer before settling into a medium-paced drum rhythm with electronic enhancements - something akin to the white side of MUSLIMGAUZE's black. "Run, Run, Run, Blue Room" begins with some-one whistling over ambient sound before settling into a 'normal' Ethnic drum rhythm with strange squeeky noises & a great deep drum punctuation appearing at a set point. It tries (I feel) to be darker than it actually is, although it manages to maintain a strong sense of the senseless. "Petals" has a non-beat voice & koto-type beginning, giving it a trad Japanese flavour - a rather beautiful shapeless thing with the more Western, earthier voice.

"Blue Moon Child" is another rather atmospheric piece - rising out of flanging ocean waves, this probably owes a little to people like HAROLD BUDD, although to he honest it evades easy comparisons. It moves through a languid dream-space, puntuated by piano arpeggios which shimmer like golden showers. The female voice, calm, almost a whisper, is joined by strange child-like sounds. "Oulam" builds up on a thin but constant rhythm as ancient spirits rise in whirling clouds from sandy graves, encouraged to dance by the music and the memory of pain and a distant lost past. "It's A Small World" enters the arena on chimes and gongs while taped child-like voice (& instrument) play like !Hometime" from TG's "D.O.A." album - ambient noise etc with strange, disconnected words. As with all these tracks, strange & fascinating effects, almost too subtle to register in the review, appear like kinephantoms - dying away as soon as focussed upon. A rhythm, along similar lines to O YUKI CONJUGATE, MUSLIMGAUZE etc, grows up through the chimes, changing as it goes. "George & Taijasa (April 1990)" is a short, infant groan. "Bali North Dakota" is another Ethnic-sounding rhythm over which has a very electronic soul, a sound too much on a level to be anything but synthetic. Having said which, it's a great, compulsive thing, surging forward at a medium pace. "Pale Horse" opens as a non-beat drifting thing with subtle shifting of pink noise and keyboard while trumpet (courtesy of GARY MANKUS) plays across the background. The voices - female singing, male orating in a calm, DAVID BYRNE-like-way a tale that drifts with the shapeless, calming music. "Life Garden" uses a sitar sample like morse code, before building a whole huge, almost funeral-march-slow rhythm over the top, growing through the firmament, reaching ever-upward with it's voice phantasies. "I'm Not A Ghost" closes the album, using chains as a rhythmic device. It grows on almost pained male voice, wailing in great misery. The female vox seem further back in the indefinable, almost-Industrial rhythm, a sound which is darkly atmospheric.

LIFE GARDEN are GEORGE DILLON, SU LING HEYRICH-OLIPHANT & DAVID OLIPHANT with assistance of GARY MANKUS & the voices of ALAN BISHOP & TAIJASA HEYDRICH-OLIPHANT. The instruments include Tibetan Bells & bowls, Bird flute, Chanter, Noah Bells & a variety of more common instruments. A fascinating album for those who want something lighter, more mellow, yet rhythmic & don't feel like going as far as to risk New Age. An album to drift to.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.