Sunday, January 26, 2020

Album Review: temporal.Divergence by Peter Edwards Ambient

Peter Edwards, an ambient/dark ambient experimental soundsculptor based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, recording as Peter Edwards Ambient, landed on my radar screens only during the summer of 2018, shortly before releasing his third full-length CD album temporal.Divergence as the next chapter of dark ambient pentalogy. Available in digital formats since August 18th, 2018, the stunningly designed 6-panel digipak was released a few weeks later through Peter's own Caffeinated Monk Production label, the home of his previous two impressive CDs, suspended.Lucidity (May 2015) and binary.Abstractions (July 2017). To me, this was a huge discovery indeed!!!

Perfectly described as "ambient music for time travellers", this thrillingly immersing odyssey is ignited by the shorter "Prelude", which immediately sets the spatially tenebrous atmosphere. The 6-plus minutes long title track "temporal.Divergence" is fueled by bouncing cyber-tech pulses juxtaposed by industrial outbursts, razor-sharp beats, and heavenly hissing solitariness. A truly jaw-dropping introduction to distinguishably transporting realms by Peter Edwards!!! "quantum.Flux" at 7:33, the longest ride on the album, amalgamates massive drone reverberations with transcendentally helixing meridians and ear-tickling glimmers. Another aural spectacle! "revolution.Induction" masterfully merges hypogeally enigmatic stratums with perpetually ascending galvanic beacons and eerily rumbling fractals. Sonorously mindblowing! "gravField.Theory" dives into gargantuan depths, which are persistently illuminated by eternally galloping oscillations and piercing sci-fi narrations by Randy Savage, who also contributed his voice on the opening "Prelude". "dark.Matter" sails through unfathomably breathtaking realms, where intangibly thundering, yet tenaciously ambiguous magnitudes, commingle with inconspicuously emanating desolations and transmogrifying resonant vertexes. Beyond the gates listening splendor continues also through "causal.Continuum", when mesmerizingly barren heavy-duty beats collide with remotely roaring perplexes. "tempo.Kinetix", as indicated by its title, shifts into a vigorously driven scenario, perforated here and there by outbursting strikes, while immensely panoptic layers are guarding above. "time.Machine" merges abysmally engulfing murmurs with translucently flickering fragments and clandestinely arising oracular ephemerons. On "The Quantum Mechanics Of Time Travel Through Post-Selected Teleportation", mysteriously nuanced drones are reinforced by the narrations of a "quantum mechanic" Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Short epilogue "Gate.22180818" closes the album, but hidden also is a 4-minute untitled bonus track, which remains in fascinatingly enveloping monochromatic cosmic zones, percolated by gossamery evanescent traceries and ear-bending numeration.

Peter Edwards Ambient is a truly staggering exploration, which shifts each listener into magnificently adventurous portals, uniquely sophisticated, meticulously crafted and intriguingly rewarding. His 64-minute temporal.Divergence album is an all-inclusive magnum opus, both sonic and visual (design by Savage Internet Media), with deeply focused content and superb presentation. A vast display of artistic brilliance, which is, unfortunately, still hidden to a larger audience within the ambient drone soundscaping. On the science note, this must be some kind of a call I received only several months after experiencing the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, a Radio Astronomy Observatory located on the Plains of San Agustin in central New Mexico. I really wish I knew this gifted sound designer when passing by Albuquerque. Grab your headphones and immerse yourself into this exquisitely monumental futuristic journeying!!!

Reviewed by Richard Gürtler (Oct 20, 2019, Bratislava, Slovakia)