My Review:
Colorful sophisticated tapestries of electronic wonders, beautifully and cleverly merged with refreshing Asian influences, intelligent contemporary Jazzy textures and alternative warm ambi-dream pop. All of this is perfectly crafted, engineered and embroidered to create a unique voyage that will take you to some visual and emotional landscapes.
A rich combination of ambient, chillout, IDM, electronica, lounge and delicate breaks that contains some sort of innocent beauty, a naive optimistic charm of some kind…“Falling through the Earth” holds a real sense of adventure. Sorcery and mysterious elusive illusions reveal themselves by taking forms of sounds, then disappearing into the air, luring the listener into the enchanted territories they came from with a promise for a magical enlightenment.
Sensual grooves blending with urban moods and pastoral ambience. Fredrik Ohr is a musician and producer from Stockholm, Sweden and “Falling through the Earth” is his much awaited debut album. Besides Fredrik’s wonderful programming and great synth and keyboard work you will also find a few more various instruments in “Falling through the Earth”, such as: flutes, saxophone, acoustic guitar, percussion, double bass and Rhodes piano. On some instruments Fredrik is playing beautifully himself, and the rest is played by his fellow musicians, doing a beautiful job as well. You will also find lush atmospheric vocal layers on several compositions here, sometimes lyrically infused, adding a melange of flavours to this journey. So like it says on the Aleph Zero release notes, ” Fredrik has a long background in classical piano and as a song writer, and that is highly evident in the subtle complexity underlying his music.”
Fredrik’s compositions are indeed complex, multi-layered and spiced with soft psychedelic touches and elegant glitches yet there is a certain kind of catchiness in his music that captures the listener. The Aleph Zero label is well known in this “scene” of music and in the last six years the Aleph Zero team and artists delivered quite a few releases that are characterized by high levels of production, beautiful, innovative multi-colored music, and original artwork. I can honestly say that there are no exceptions with “Falling through the Earth”, in fact, with this release the Aleph Zero label is setting even higher standards of production and genre-fusing, thanks to Fredrik Ohr’s musical and production skills and Yaniv Shulman’s refined mastering work. Of course that most of the credit goes to Fredrik Ohr for his fresh and interesting musical vision and his realization of it, but some of the credit also goes to Shahar and Yaniv ( the two minds behind Aleph Zero ) for their good instincts, choosing beautiful unique music, finding new talents and serving the music as a lovely piece of sonic and visual jewelry.
The artwork of this album was created by Ryan Bubnis and it’s quite different from the artwork of the previous Aleph Zero releases. Ryan Bubnis’s style is very captivating and intriguing, and I can’t really explain why but what he did for this album really fits the music. “Falling through the Earth” is very suitable to unwind with at the end of the day but also suitable to start the day with on a nice cozy vacation morning. It’s filled with strange pleasant tranquility yet it provides a deep and unexpected listening experience. Genre-fusing at its finest.
Cheers !
Gad K.
