Alpha Wave Movement
Architexture Of Silence

2013

Architexture Of Silence is a five-track New Age-oid album by the Massachusetts-based Ambient luminary Gregory Kyryluk aka Alpha Wave Movement, recorded over a timespan of roughly two years, released in July 2013 on Harmonic Resonance Recordings and available to purchase and listen to in full at Bandcamp. As with every album the producer has come up with thus far, Architexture Of Silence is a strongly ethereal and transformative work, meaning that no matter the title, artwork and intrinsic concept, the listener knows what to expect and expects what to know when he or she enters the synth-fueled antrums of Alpha Wave Movement. This time, Kyryluk augments the aesthetics of his aural visions via a title-related minimalism: all five tracks are named Movement and given a sequential Roman numeral. There is no overarching topic that ties these pieces together, and it is not needed, for the sounds themselves are the bonding devices. Highlighted as “reflective music for navigating the inner landscapes” by the artist, this sparse description has to do it. The arrangements themselves comprise the archetypical – I would even go so far as to say mandatory – synth washes and echoey aftereffects, but Kyryluk is also surprisingly keen on ameliorating these long, distinctly crepuscular vignettes with rotor-like synth spirals which are unexpectedly energetic and feel strangely close or immediate. With the omission of any goblet drum or tribal/Pagan percussion, Architexture Of Silence still features beat-like patterns in four out of its five songs and sounds retro enough to please followers of the artist and aficionados of acroamatic works alike. How are the movements transformed into music, and is there a certain fluxion or float of time and space, given the nebulous theme?

Movement I launches with the ethereal synth patterns one expects from the post-millennial material of Alpha Wave Movement: seraphic pads, occasionally coated in spiraling helixes of plinking pings and interstitial sustain phases whose slow fade-out and frequent encrustation of the cusps creates a spectral aura in the periphery of the synths, whereas their nucleus is emanating a cosmic erethism. No clear loop-based structure is discoverable; the movement of undulation is predictable and stable, true, but the surface and opalescent structure of each billow remains a surprise each time. Movement I is enormously retrogressive, and while Kyryluk’s mix creates a wondrous wideness and clear cut cavity in tandem with the applied filters, this first movement could have otherwise been perfectly spawned in the 90’s already. Self-referencing its motion, the second half of Movement I includes arpeggiated alkaline globs and their aquatic counterparts. The mood is arcane and deep, even though the synth washes are neither as overwhelmingly grandiloquent nor gargantuan. The listening subject does not submerge, only touches the moist surface once in a while due to the otherwise elysian duskiness of this piece.

The following 13 minutes of Movement II seem to cross-fade into the endemic crepuscule of the opener, but this arrangement soon starts to move for real within its physical and time-dependent boundaries. The arpeggio of a golden-shimmering cavalcade of droplets becomes more crisp and punchy, echoey coils of glacial galactosamines gyrate around the chopped flumes. Here, the alloy is the allure, as are the various structures and timbres. Even dark matter pads are on board which first serve as bass runlets, but are soon outshone by the comparably crunchy compound. A hybrid between a crystal cavern, aeriform vastness and a subterranean oggin, Movement II rounds off its rather energetic edge with sizzling shakers. Movement III then turns out to be the hibernal frost pattern of the album. Alpha Wave Movement revs up what was heretofore hidden in Movement II already, namely the various states and transmutations of piercing chimes, blinking bells and gaseous whistles. The interplay between the bass drones, iridescent luminosity and pitch-black nonentity of silence is the actual achievement of this movement. The glistening sparks oscillate, pulsate and glimmer through multitudinous stations. Sometimes they resemble driblets, at other times they mimic artificial apparitions. Despite the meaningfulness of the concept of silence which prominently graces the album title and the artist’s moniker, the second phase of Movement III boosts the cherubic gradient of the synth thickets as well as the implications of laid-back beats. Darkly wobbling sawtooth bass lines augment the movement, and not coincidentally is it here where the glitziest pulsars are dropped, with their languorous euphony adding a maximum of enchantment to the wraithlike but forsaken fluxion.

Movement IV is the Ambient track among the Ambient tracks in that its physiognomy neglects any scent of a beat and only comprises of prolonged wave-like phases of acid-coated New Age streams. The half-tone steps as well as the great pool of textures cause a tranquilizing state. The spacey harp in the middle and its downwards spiraling glissando is undoubtedly another sumptuous layer, as are the ghostly Doppler effects, but here, for once, there is no movement whatsoever. Alas, the real-world time is running, but this vaulted capsule called Movement IV does not. The closer Movement V is the final progressive piece and unchains multitudinous surface structures that make it hard – and most importantly de trop – to review its blazing diversification in technical terms. All there is to say is that the process of alteration is an ongoing one throughout the piece. Gregory Kyryluk fathoms out all intertwinements that were presented previously, the manifold coalescences between bells, energetic synth bursts and their angelic afterglows. These states are only the steppingstones of the things to come, a rotor-esque shrapnel galore of spiky pads with hidden pentatonic complexions. 

While the following assertion might seem mean-spirited, let me assure you that it is not: Alpha Wave Movement’s Architexture Of Silence could be astutely described with the reverse wisdom “Forwards never, backwards ever,” and that is no bad thing at all in the given prospects of Rave revivals, Synth Pop explosions and the reinvention of the 80’s. Naturally, Gregory Kyryluk has anything to do with either of the three admittedly curious examples, but remains in a sphere of his own, a capsule that weathers the tides of times. The arrangements themselves burst at the seams due to their plasticity and the threatening silence that is such a regular and important constituent, for it allows the sounds to echo and fade out. What is seemingly antediluvian is the amounts of arpeggio and sparkling glints, a treatment that is omnipresent in each of the five Movement pieces. Likewise, no matter how thick or dense a synth structure is, it never fully embraces the listener and giving him or her insight, but always inherits at least a few remnants of enigmatic protuberances and fissures of twilight. Every Ambient fan knows what that implies: a purposely strong New Age aura. The ethereality is not reached via magnitudes of gigantic synth channels. It is the timbre of distance and transcendence that causes this, the latter of which is not coincidentally also the title of Alpha Wave Movement’s debut from 1995. The simultaneity of cutting edge spirals and glitzy prongs with the mysteriously twirling arabesques does not offer anything particularly new, but at least takes the music of Alpha Wave Movement back where it belongs to after a fleeting visit to earthbound patterns in Eolian Reflections (2012): to the ether. 

Further listening:

You can purchase and listen to Architexture Of Silence in full at Bandcamp. 

Ambient Review 249: Alpha Wave Movement – Architexture Of Silence (2013). Originally published on Aug. 14, 2013 at AmbientExotica.com.