French Archives

Another indispensable compendium of the great French experimental artist's musical opera. With this four-LP box set of fully unreleased archival materials, Ariel Kalma ideally retraces the map of his own path and spiritual journey during the '70s. Some of music contained in Sarasvati Planet Ariel, Planet Air, Ascend Descend, and Astral Cathedral are born as sound environments for group therapy sessions that carrying healing, trance, and relaxation. The occult and arcane music of Kalma awakens consciousness, expands chakras, sculpts memory indelibly, appears to encompass all the emotional aspects of the universe, and brings it's listeners back to the archetypal moments of creation. What is most impressive is the variety of atmospheric stimuli, the rich source of inspiration and compositional mastery. The solemn, triumphal and liturgical, meditative and ascending tone of celestial chapel organs and harmonium, the darkness of Farfisa and Yamaha PS-30 lunar and spectral sequences, the exotic oriental breath of circular dances transfigured and dissolving by the specular shapes of the Wasp Synth... everything converges to the purity abyssal of eternity sound. The melodic and harmonic phrases of sax always reveal a deep song, while the solar blow of flute gives elegiac moments of Debussyian flavor as bucolic recalls of fauns from Eden's lost. Listeners will be struck by equinoxial and solstitial lights, in perfect balance between flares and shadows, nature and galactic procession. Kalma's sensitive ear is expressionist, almost a possible scenario for astral architectural utopias of visionaries such as Hablik, Taut, Steiner, or Poelzig; it absorbs and re-reads in a personal way some insights of the cosmic psychedelia of the early '70s such as K. Schulze, Heldon, Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh. The music is fully unreleased, with only a few tracks being different versions of previously released tracks.