Published by Davide Pappalardo on June 21, 2018
Inner Vision Laboratory is the project of Polish artist Karol Skrzypiec, specialized in dark ambient music with ethnic and classical influences. Active since 2005, he has published a plethora of works under different labels, moving between eerie landscapes and ethereal passages and darker, brooding and evocative episodes, sometime touching industrial elements. His new work is called Relics and is published by the Dutch label Winter-Light, an outfit focused on ambient, experimental and drone music. Here you will find a common theme inspired by science-fiction and post-apocalyptic scenarios: in the distant future mankind has disappeared, leaving behind only ruins and relics. Alien civilizations would come to visit our planet, collecting those artifacts and making a Museum of Savages in order to remember the tragedy of a self-annihilation. On the music side, we have ambient soundscapes evoking void spaces and vast immensities, a desert world ravaged by winds during eternal nights.
Death seer starts our journey with its sampled storm-sounds, letting us imagine a world in which distant recorded voices lose themselves among the hostile nature of the surface. Droning lines and sudden effects give us a sonic narrative going beyond the simple concept of enthralling music. Badlands is a monolithic affair, a dark ambient mantra made of sound-layers and sharp industrial elements. The atmosphere is disturbing and malevolent, once again recalling a not friendly environment; electronic glimpses add a sci-fi taste to the track while keeping all the dark elements.
What we left behind uses hidden melodies among disturbances and cutting sounds, evoking a melancholic elegy thanks to piano sounds and inspiring lines. For once emotion is free to express itself, but it is a bitter and sad kind of emotion. Derelicts returns to dark territories, showing us the more industrial-oriented side of Skrzypiec’s music, still keeping droning elements and mechanical effects: a world devoid of life, where machines are still operating without any meaning or sense beyond the looping actions they perpretate.
The work ends with the title track, a dissonant and malevolent episode with alarming sounds and aggressive-but-crawling samples and loops, a sort of ancient scream expressed by unnatural elements, a “ghost in the machine”. The very long number evolves slowly with the adding of dark ambient passages and almost epic mantras, achieving a hypnotizing quality during its second half thanks to eerie melodies and soothing sounds.
Once again the Dutch label presents us a work in which dark ambient music becomes a mean for a sonic narration, a dystopian tale about a very possible future, a sort of “anti-field-recodings” work where the sounds of a bleak future are imagined and created by the artist by the means of technology. If you are looking for a meditative listening experience with cinematic elements, here you will find the object of your quest.
Label: Winter-Light
Rating: 7,5