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Heavenly new age ambient synthesis and 4th world navigations by two leading lights of their field, flocking to a mutual spirit at the behest of Australia’s eternally reliable Good Morning Tapes. RIYL Asa-Chang & Junray, Jon Hassell, Nueen, Enya, David Toop.

Meeting for the first time on record - although it sounds like they’ve been making music together forever - GRM alum Ariel Kalma brings some half a century of experience accrued deep in synth music’s most esoteric realms, to Leaving Records’ Indo-NYC trio Asa Tone, on a gorgeous album spun from the legendary Electronic Wind Instrument woven with modular synth, xaphoon, sax, and rainforest sounds. 

Their debut communion represents an ideal of intergenerational dialogue, with both sides sublimating their energies at the service of the lush whole, where bioluminescent arps sparkle on slow shifting beds of swaying bass amid swirls of lilting woodwind within a self-contained imaginary physics that makes the body feel lighter, and most elegantly plays out on the back of the eyelids.

It’s testament to the natural porousness of approach and timeless vision of both Kalma and his younger spars that they work so well together, cleanly transcending cloying cliches and simply cutting direct to more meaningful planes of existence that need little explanation - you know the feeling when you’re left floating and blissed to the fingertips.

Everything is wrapped up in an opening statement ‘Interlace’, where the elements knit and dematerialise with a sense of deferred suspense that could last forever. The twin winds of tradition and imagination continue to push them to beatific heights in ‘28°35’S 153°22’E’, and pastoral lull on ‘Art of Memory’, while they braid the air like Enya on her noumenal loom with ‘Two Winds’,  crafting a raft for supine bodies to drift away into on ‘An Expanse II.’"

-Boomkat