HUMAN GREED - Fortress Longing

More delicate, nostalgic and rarefied, the new work from the duo Michael Begg-Deryk Thomas immediately plunges into a dimension suspended between heaven and earth, framed between the dark piano tolls in a desert of scattered sound events on "Invocation" and the sacred-steeped voices that give way to string drones and elusive, shadowy architectures on "Malagathens: Hotel".

Balancing acoustic pictorialism with dreamlike electronic evolutions, Human Greed, aided by the manipulation of samples and field recordings, pen a long elegy steeped in melancholic extremism, by turns plunging fearlessly into the fearsome yet fascinating recesses of the human soul and diffusing the accumulated tension through subtly rarefied ambient textures. This interplay of converging opposites takes in the Stars Of The Lid-like wanderings of "Fortress Longing", the crepuscular nightmare of "In Absentia Variations", the elegy of the unfathomable in "Weeping Bees Of Heraklion" (almost a variation on the vocal estrangement of Julianna Barwick), the echoing depths of "Anxiety" and the "classically"-shaped unease of "The Green Line" and "Solar Wind" (featuring spoken vocals from Begg and Boitos).

The album holds hidden corners and seemingly impenetrable places, moments of pure surrender to the mystery of memory ("Changing of The Saddest Guard II"), scatterings of feeling within the darkest fog, which the apotheosis of "An End To Death" attempts to remedy with an accumulation of symphonic masses.

The album is enriched by contributions from a few trusted collaborators (cellist Julia Kent — already a veteran of Antony and the Johnsons — and Laura Sheeran, who handles the vocal harmonies and arrangements) and by the voices of Jean Marie Mathoul (among other things, a collaborator of Charlemagne Palestine) and Nicole Boitos.

The limited edition of the album, meanwhile, adds a bonus CD containing "Deshret", thirty-six minutes by Begg and Colin Potter in which the overall atmosphere of the parent album turns into a tour de force torn between droning hypnosis and faint dark-ambient laceration.

Overall, "Fortress Longing" is a work that deserves respect, but, also due to an excessive dilution of its sonic material, ends up being less successful than its predecessor.

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09/08/2011