Published by Alessandro Violante on March 22, 2016
Six years have passed since the release of the last album of the Canadian project Iszoloscope, one of the leading names of the Ant-Zen label, and very few people would have expected this new work called False Vacuum, released a few days ago by the well-known German label. Here, Yann Faussurier doesn’t give us anything truly revolutionary, when compared with his past works, but certainly we can see an even more special attention for the production, as well as a more varied rhythmic section, far from any standard distortion used by many of his colleagues.
Two are the main stylistic features of the project: the first is the eternal and intelligent combination of ambient / dark ambient moments and harsh and telluric rhythms composed with surgical precision, while the second is the variety of the rhythmic solutions here proposed, and in this we can say that he has really no limits, ranging from the straight techno of Chronophage (on which, however, his noise reworking is always recognizable) to breathtaking breakcore shocks like those of Absolute and eternal moral nighttime, going through some really “hit the spot” and engaging rhythms like those of Faint negative charge, a passage in which the melodic component is put in communication with the rhythmic architecture in a really excellent way.
Iszoloscope is also able, as he has always shown and also demonstrate now in False Vacuum, to create moments of ambient / dark ambient of great atmosphere, which are of fundamental importance to the structure of the entire album. The long opener Awe gratitude rapture has a growing crescendo, whose array of orchestral sounds seem to recall an ancient past and an esoteric imaginary, which is also found in the other two pieces belonging to the same type (two songs that make us sink in very dark places and landscapes), and the two parts of Experimenting with truth Solve (et) Coagula (this one is an ancient alchemical formula that the alchemists used to evolve and regenerate themselves).
With an important and multi-layered work as False Vacuum, Iszoloscope regenerated him after six years of hiatus, reproducing his perfect alchemical formula in a more fluid, more precise and, if possible, even better amalgamated way. The aforementioned Faint… is a clear example, a melodic motif vaguely mentioned in the beginning that then enters with power, and just as good is the entrance of a primordial synth, almost in a tribal way, in Spectral inverter. Relevance outside logic surprises us with its pauses, its strong sense of groove (a common element to all the tracks on the album), the steel-like and rhythmic backbeats, as well as, again, a melody of the esoteric and orchestral kind. Another brilliant moment is given us in Vacuum metastability, in which the distorted rhythm grows in a perfect manner after being introduced by a tribal rhythm.
There are so many factors that make unique the “Iszoloscope formula” in his genre: the unique fusion of ambient and dark ambient atmospheres, the very fluid and flexible rhythms that range seamlessly between a techno beat straight to the point and a broken pace even within the same song, and, of course, the great taste for melodic passages as well as a remarkable intelligence that allow him to create a perfect dialogue between the different sections which play perfectly together, never clashing but contributing, on the contrary, to the well-developed final result .
False Vacuum is perhaps his most mature work: the one in which all of his sound trademarks have gained a total independence from his music scene of reference. Iszoloscope has never been so “personal” before.
Label: Ant-Zen
Rating: 8, 5