NEEL - Phobos

Dismissed by many as a mere sidekick to Donato Dozzy in Voices From The Lake, Giuseppe Tillieci has worked his way up to the point of releasing for the very same Spectrum Spools that has by now taken on his mentor full-time. One can't help thinking that the key to it all boiled down to some three-way word-of-mouth, with Dozzy acting as an imposing sponsor for the young squire's arrival at John Elliott's doorstep. Despite that, though, the result of the partnership offers a further (and far more important) justification in itself.

Let's start by saying - and here it's plain to see - that a large share of the credit for the abyssal depths reached by Voices From The Lake belongs to Neel. Put even more bluntly: if Dozzy, with his expertly assorted techno, is the commander at the submarine's helm, Neel is the explorer at the periscope, the expert on seabed life forms, the scientist capable of scoring it all through a sinister, dark form of ambient music, heavily indebted (at least on this "Phobos") to original kosmische muzik.

And this is exactly the crux of the matter mentioned earlier: Spectrum Spools, perhaps the label par excellence of the post-cosmic ambient synth music revival, here plants its flag-bearer in the Ocean of those soundscapes that Tangerine Dream set within the boundless cosmos on "Zeit". And "Phobos" is exactly that, a Pete Namlook-style stroll across an alien, unsettling seabed where light fails to reach. An exploration that paradoxically starts from the end, from the dead-of-night surfacing of "Post Landing", followed, in a journey backwards, by the magnetic storm of "Storm In Sickney".

There are only seven tracks, but the lack of any real break gives the album the shape of a monolith: the dripping slow-motion of "Crater Chain Observation" only gives the illusion of one, soon disproved by the magma of "The Gravity Of Limtoc". And even the ending, where the darkness seems to thin out, does nothing but retrace in reverse the gradual descent into the abyss: "The Secret Revealed", almost a nod to Mark Seelig, is the only track that truly leaves room for feeling, a melancholy farewell before the plunge of "Life On Laputa Regio" and the acceleration of "Travelling On Kepler Dorsum".

A single documentary on darkness within pure, lifeless Nature, achieved through the slideshow of seven ultra-high-resolution photographs. What's missing, as in the recent collaboration between Werner Dafeldecker and Lawrence English, is that magic touch that turns a scientific experiment into a work of art, a series of shots into a short film, a soundtrack into a piece of sound art. But this is, all things considered and in all likelihood, a deliberate and respectable stylistic choice in favor of total realism, and in that sense it's more than accomplished.

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17/11/2014