I’ll swiftly admit my fault. When in May of last year Timo Van Luijk announced the new releases on his magnificent label, the excitement of listening again, after a small eternity, to a Mirror record (Some Days It Rains All Night) prevailed over the attention that had to be given to this other LP. It’s been 11 months now, I’ve finally gotten around to In Camera’s Lost In Spice with due care, and – guess what – I almost prefer it to the aforementioned Mirror return. This should represent yet another wakeup call for the writer, who – evidently – never learns the lessons that life imparts to him.
Van Luijk and regular accomplice Christoph Heemann possess an essential quality for this listener. Namely, the ability to merge completely different instances – both in terms of spatial/temporal dynamics and timbral selection – into a flow that spans a whole range of psychological dimensions. Across the two sides of Lost In Spice, resonant masses of analog synthesizers often seem to reflect echoes from the early period – that is, the best – of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. However, the nostalgic vision is systematically sabotaged by ubiquitous oblique drones, in turn introducing unmistakable signals of abstractionism at the same time unpredictable and disturbing.
On several occasions, the impression is that of walking in the middle of a highway crossed by alien vehicles, only grazed by the high speeds, perpetually aware of the luck of being still there, exposed to the strange sounds of those engines. The annoying stupidity of the quotidian has already been erased from the equation, as the mind gets intoxicated for good. The sonorities are malleable, fluctuating, in a state of dissonant superimposition; the pulse inside the (un)consciousness becomes stronger and stronger. Rare percussive constituents appear as scattered drops of a rain that’s not going to fall with real violence. The general lack of handles at the harmonic level grants our vibrating core further vaulting amidst clouds of richly variegated frequencies.
Summing it all up, Van Luijk and Heemann don’t skip a beat. Even without a beat. It’s a matter of deciding with which acoustic vapors you want to take off into the total absence of concrete desires.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 