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“THE BEST ALBUM OF 1998” - I'll be honest I love this album. It is played daily and yet I can't quite put in to words just how it effects me. From the first bell sounds, the first expansive chords, the first “melody”, I have been pulled in to an incredible world of beauty and drama. Like a fractal image, the deeper you go the more is revealed. The music evolves yet the initial elements remain. Instead of melodies there are phrases that criss-cross each other - binding, breaking, merging, creating. Subtle changes mean that just as you click on a musical line it metamorphoses to something different, even the shifting timbre of a sound or duration of a note becomes important. Composed completely on synthesisers this could have been just another good electronic music album. But Phil broadens the spectrum by also using very realistic acoustic guitar, harp, percussion and choral sounds, bringing them in to great effect with the fractal producing the feel and expression of the playing. Many of the tracks, like “Shadows Fall” and “Strange Attractors” have a calming effect. Mesmerising, not because they are pretty or sugar sweet but because they feel familiar yet always new. They also affect you physically. Listening with my eyes closed I can get a distinct feeling of floating and slowly spinning that, first time round, is quite unnerving. But there is also drama and passion here. In the mammoth “A Season in Hell” great armies trample the landscape. Dark jungles of menace close in. Giants shadows hide the sun. Tympani and orchestral stabs joined by whistles and cymbals fight it out. Glockenspiel and harp call out in argument. Battle lines are drawn. The calm before the fight. The clashing of steel and bodies in hand to hand combat. The bleak aftermath of a bloodied field. Highly charged listening which can wear this listener out! Fractal based music has a certain notoriety for being high brow; nothing more than un-listenable academic exercises. Not this time. Phil has realised something quite extraordinary - an accessible, magical mix of music and mathematics. Neil Leacy, Wind & Wire Magazine, March 1999. Reproduced with Permission.