Ariel Kalma – An Evolutionary Music (Original Recordings: 1972-1979)

RVNG Intl.

Ariel Kalma first came to my attention after snagging myself up his 0smose re-issue some years back, a startling re-imagining of ambient music from 1978 centred round the rainforest sounds of Borneo, a strung-out beauty well ahead of its time, and a revelation I was happy to hear more of. Now fast forwarding to 2014, the New York RVNG INTL. label have just unearthed a perfect prescription to enhance those otherworldly vibes, a 17 track, two disc epic that glimpses into the Kalma soundscaping of the Seventies. A document that attempts to throw light on his Kalian approach to the notion of ambient, his desire to suspend your disbelief or extend it on the tensile drop of rain from a leaf’s tip or the fluxing contours of cloud-gathering skies.

It’s a sedate affair as you would imagine, the tramlined contours and jetting streaks of “Almora Sunrise” so thick with insect life you can almost feel the warmth of the rising sun around them. The subterranean minimalisms of “Rainy Day” and its hazy saxophonic auras savannah-stretched like a leisured cat. The zero gravities of “Les Étoiles Sont Allumées” and its Laika-like float of bewitched cosmonautics wound round Kalma’s word weaves. A near-perfect nailing of tranquillity considering the primitive tools he was dabbling with, even the tidal samples which the preceding decades have reduced to a boring cliché here seem to gleam with fresh life, its sand-sucking toll paired with the pattering betweens of prayer wheels on “Voltage Controlled Wave” or “Yogini Breath”‘s temple shells trapped in its gentle whip. A lapping that mysteriously belays a Tangerine Dreamed peppering, leaping white with soft-coloured vocal harmonies and sweeping paper planes.

The Indian chants seem to transcend cliché too, as if it’s all sourcing from the root imbued with a fascination with the subject matter, Kalma like some hippy alchemist tinkering with its presence in your consciousness until the actual was no more, leaving you a dreamy anemone filtering on its vital essence. A notion of ‘new age’ music before the term was coined, a world away from the insipid rain sticks it would later trickle away on or those accursed panpipes. Even the surprise drum machine usage on “What Would You Say” could have spelled the kiss of death in lesser hands, but here it scoops playfully at you, its bemused coda suggesting pop success could come from the most unlikely of places.

Everything is glazed in a kind of appreciated ‘beauty’ which verges on the sacred, the like of which Messiaen was so keen to harvest but attached too much religious gravitas to. As if Kalma were holding an empathic, even esoteric, flame to the world around him, a vision shared in the ecstatic antennas of Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley or La Monte Young. A spiritual ink well of long organic unfurls, drone candy embellished in flute, keyboard punctures, sustained chants. “Sister Echo” with its female vocalist moaning ecstatically to a pebbling percussion, a heady concoction of flute enticing her breath to weave in further multiples.

This is music to dissolve into, a biomorphic mirror glinting harmonically in your mind, cosmically groping towards the infinite. Kalma poetically trapped in a hypno-pump of a spiralling organ on “Tous Les Jours,” etching repeats, the bassiness of his voice rich and celestial. It’s no accident the cover art has him starring out all Austin Spare-like, planetary mobiles spinning above his Leo Sayer hair, fingers no doubt planted mid-drone, a frozen moment, like his music, vibrating out from the past and into the future.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-

Watch Matthew McGuigan‘s documentary about a day in the life of Kalma online here.