Vidna Obmana - Crossing The Trail

Talk about sublime. This release from Vidna Obmana is drifting across distant alien landscapes in a big way. Letting you drift along too, but never letting you out of its sights.

Ambient music has come a very long way since the days when musicians had a few unruly oscillators and several tracks of magnetic tape to work with. This is the future after all, and with all the ultra stable sound generation hardware and digital audio processing software currently available it's not surprising that music like this is sounding the way it was meant to. Getting closer to the way the composer hears it.

At times the long pensive cycles, which enter the picture from time to time, take on an urgency that shouldn't be able to exist down at there at -120 bpm. And what's with those spatial effects, created when various percussion sounds play around with some of the most unearthly sound effects and slumbering pads I've ever had the pleasure of being exposed to.

From Belgium then comes this masterpiece, created by Vidna Obmana with a contribution from Steve Roach, and one from Jeff Pierce. This is music channeled from another time and place through a medium that really knows what it's doing.

Rating - 901,847 (out of a possible 1,000,000)