TIP OF THE TONGUE 02 AUGUST 2009
Stellar Om Source
Rise In Planes
Black Dirt Records BD-007
LP
OUT OF STOCK!
Stellar Om Source is Christelle Gualdi, who has played as a member of Way Of The Cross (along with The Skaters and Dave Nuss etc) and in a great trio with Bill Kouligas and Nackt Insecten. Rise In Planes is her debut LP after a run of self-released CD-Rs. Unlike many of the her more punk-primitive ‘new age synth’ contemporaries, Gualdi is a trained musician but she has the vision to put her chops to the service of divine cosmo-communion in the mode of Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Hermann Nitsch and Terry Riley. She combines gorgeous, rippling keyboard runs with clusters of overtone gravity so thick they seem to simply hang in the air and vibrate. This limited edition LP, in a run of 300 copies with covers silkscreened by Phil Franklin of Sunburned Hand Of The Man presents two side long pieces, one a solo keyboard fantasia and the other a beautifully weird single-note organ drone given an endlessly swinging aspect by the addition of drummer Dave Nuss of The No-Neck Blues Band. For something so minimal in its construction its ludicrously addictive, as Nuss’s mesmeric, subtle time keeping somehow revisions Gualdi’s bubbling monochord drone as a pulsing Ur-groove with an immense organic logic. The flip is a beautiful rainbow tone piece for solo keyboard that combines flashing pitch-shift arpeggios with timbres and modes salvaged from 1980s synth soundtracks and 1970s keyboard ritual. Of all the new age synth groups currently active, Stellar Om Source feels closest to the atmosphere of ritual abandon of free jazz, taking off where Alice Coltrane’s electric re-scoring of A Love Supreme left off and applying a contemporary drone mindset to the piloting of the future. Highly recommended.
