Lost Fairy Realm — Lost Fairy Realm
The music itself is dark ambient soundscapes, cold gusts and resonances with an eerie, displaced feeling, at times assuming a grainy, digital character, degraded and mishapen with distortion, facilitating the moment in which an equipment malfunction becomes indistinguishable from the speaking voice of an other dimensional entity.
The low fidelity recording is skillfully used to create an air of mystery, of lost memories inexplicably unearthed. This may be a CDr, but it's sonically and spiritually most similar to the countless ritualistic industrial and noise cassettes that circulated throughout the 80's and early 90's. One might surmise some kind of playful quality to the music from the title 'Lost Fairy Realm' or track titles like "Soap-Seller Fairy", but I would say there is little mirth in the music, akin to a nearly opaque pool reflecting disjointed glimpses of strange nightmare images.
It initially sounds like a grey blur, for its constant use of verb, unclear recording, and limited frequency range, but the album is actually brimming with a variety of recorded sounds and sections. Aside from the rushing of air, Lago's other favored sound is that of the soprano female voice, wailing in forboding vibrato in a style familiar to gothic and surrealist art through the ages. The sensation of listening to the spirits of a drowned choir is one of the most interesting aspects of the album.
There is a theatric, gestural progression to the album, with each sound rapidly following the previous, clearly meant for active listening. The album is actually quite fast paced by ambient standards, recalling the tense macabre dream visions of Naked City's "Absinthe".
This album is ultimately not as strikingly engaging or strange as "Absinthe", as it gets a little lost in murkiness and nondescript drift, and fails to surprise with many new ideas after the halfway mark of the album has passed. The artist does the best possible with a clearly low budget setup, but ultimately the sounds here are a lot more claustrophobic than the expansive, open spaces found in my favorite ambient music. The sounds can be ringy, and fatiguingly dense with treble.
This album is a valiant effort, a soundscape with many layers to decipher, even if they are a bit muddled into one awkward mass. The ghoulish, vintage horror film atmosphere achieved on this album is a good example of successful low budget bedroom recording. This would make a great 'Halloween' ambient album, ideal as it is for causing faces to appear in fog.