KOPERNIK - Kopernik

A dazzling yet utterly fragile record, music that worms its way under the skin, emotional yet razor-sharp, as dazzlingly constructed and ingenious as it is melancholically pure. Sometimes a masterpiece reveals itself by surprise, unexpectedly, one listen after another.

Kopernik are a US duo (Tim Delaney and Brad Lewis), and they've built this little gem on the minimal use of electronic treatments and cello, while still drawing on a number of guests (piano, french horn, guitar, percussion). Eight electroacoustic sketches of miraculous perfection, in under 35 minutes of music.

The first two tracks, "Ondoyant Et Divers" and "Theme For Grace", mark a luminous, introverted beginning, with the cello sketching voluminous acoustic traces within a sonic space bounded by a play of electronic echoes. The first reference point is the work of cellist Wolfgang Tiepold on some of Klaus Schulze's records, but there's something less showy and more lyrically unsettling in Kopernik. The mood shifts decisively with "Man, Myth And Magic", where an Eastern-tinged percussive pattern expands into an introverted, ambient second half, clearly cinematic and descriptive in feel, with experimental fragments smudging the picture.

"Ava Peacefully" and "Kopernistan" broaden the discourse, with the cello engaged in dramaturgical dialogue amid a sea of solitude. The late-Romantic symphonic inspiration is unmistakable, at times evoking the expansive musical landscapes of Nordic composers like Sibelius. That classicism comes fully into focus on "The Sea And The March Are One", a track of miraculous balance, with choir and orchestra layered together: five intensely charged minutes, with melodic hints as compressed as they are looming, suspended in a void, as abstract as they are celebratory and imposing. The mood turns relatively more relaxed and linear with "Faraday", its closing section dominated by a handful of guitar chords as effective as they are sparse. The brief "Found Photograph" closes out the CD.

A masterpiece of strong, carefully honed compositional structure, one that borrows its overall framework from classical music without lapsing into the preciousness of contemporary chamber music, avant-garde without gratuitous cacophony, ambient in its evident psycho-acoustic echoes without replicating their stasis and cyclicality — if anything, marked instead by a strong internal dialectic. Many might find it boring, perhaps, but to me it's the album of the year.

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28/10/2006