My review: Youth & Gaudi - Stratosphere

 My Review:

Youth & Gaudi - Stratosphere

Life as layers, a set of adjacent films that continue their journey through the earth's atmosphere. And, from one of those, celestial music comes to make us moving shells, consciously connected to the art of seduction and emotional and physical participation thanks to the new album by Martin Glover (aka Youth), a timeless minstrel who runs through the decades with mastery and innumerable qualities, bassist and founder of Killing Joke and producer of the last Pink Floyd album, and Gaudi, the talent of human joy who knows how to be contagious and to sweeten existence.

The two, friends who really respect each other, have once again opened up the highway of beauty for a record that generously demonstrates and qualifies their musical intersections, for a set of moments of pure ecstasy, frenzies which roll into dances that from the epidermis reach our limbs for a pleasantly devastating connection.

Emotional territories show faces and breaths, the stratosphere of the title is perfectly rendered visible, a flying whole that takes planet Earth into a disco full of fascinations, sensorial experiments and fatuous fires in sweaty, explosive, surely smiling and purely thinking bodies: such work conveys energies and moods connected to total participation. Like a silent journey, where voices can be absent, here the two start from the 90s to explore and probe that part of electronic music that had found itself in need of legitimising itself, in the face of the world of guitars that was showing a dangerous ageing.

So it was that Transglobal Underground, Orb (both were close collaborators in that magical project), Orbital, The Klf, The Future Sound Of London and many others gave dance music the chance to show all its intelligence, inserting themselves in genres such as acid house, drum and bass, dub, techno, breakbeat and so on, including gothic influences too.

From that history Youth & Gaudi took the best cells, developing them, to create links that explore possibilities they were capable of making infinite and touching. Notes like stroboscopic lights, connections and dynamics towards dilations and insights: the result offers the joy of noting an excellent state of health.

Nine stars imbued with absolute grace hurtle through the universe taking little more than fifty-two minutes, enough to show us the intensity of the silence they know how to paint with music that does not offend it, on the contrary it is able to describe it perfectly in a way that would seem a contradiction and a negation.

Geniuses.

Absolute masters.

Enchanters of mystery and arbiters of time, in a whirling up and down where the breath deepens and thickens to keep up with this dance that makes us dreamers and reflective minds, in a combination of delicate and sumptuous fruits.

Listening to this journey, one walks in the certainty that music is a conceit vehicle, adept at creating mental rustles and suspensions which flirt to make our lives still something meaningful and solid.

The duo skilfully works on sound frequencies with complex structures that arrive at simplicity in an incredible way, because they make us swim through their alchemy, to live and see their notes, not just to listen to them. And therein lies the substantial difference from the work of other artists.

It is an infectious, effervescent mission, which is specified in a deepening of the full potential of musical genres which focus on getting rid of their selfish form in order to become selfless, in generous abundance.

They know how to travel around the world, with numerous trips between Jamaica and London, Manchester, passing through Berlin, the darkest USA, projecting towards the galaxies the will to give individual beats the ability to hold them together like a powerful but gentle glue, nothing must deteriorate. Rhythm is the lord of the album, capable of giving melodic intuitions the perfect dress of a marriage that is certainly effective.

This listening is an experience which makes one understand the desire of the two to displace the monolithic nature of that musical part that often suffers mistreatment due to certain presumed limitations: Stratosphere sweeps away doubts with its expressive form that emerges from ordinariness and transports us all to new worlds that do not deny the past, but which also need to be able to project new seeds into cyber space.

The attitude is narcotic and at the same time full of splashes of vivacity that make the result extremely positive and filled with energy: not music to cure, but to turn the experience of life into something constructive. In full health.

It is a new language that enchants and amazes, that takes us to new horizons, in fast ascents that then slow down, to wait for us. Compositions acting as a scaffold for a future that already smells of the present, to release infinite flights which sublimate existence.

The creative ductility of the two guys pushes us towards improvement, to make our listening a motive for our personal expression because these sound cells are teachers, brushstrokes on the daily fog to make it colourful and efficient.

There are moments when the dream is blessed by resounding synths, with effects that engulf us, catapulted into the fumes of the meteor tail. 

Everything is fluid and organic, what is unusual manages to take root and involve, and the new that advances becomes the hinge for a past which knows how to recognise that potentiality has become a fact of a present that Youth and Gaudi design to consign it to eternity.

One of the magics shown is the ability to make us perceive a room like a place of relaxation within dances and frenzies, where the absence of thought is not contemplated but rather the exact opposite is stimulated: the two have created the key to an imaginary place where it is possible to pass quickly through perceptions, reflections and specific propensities to make the body a flying object. And it is pure psychedelia under micro and macro electronic chips that connect the mind to the body, like an inner, personal web. 

how to range through genres and doing it with this class is a gift from the stratosphere itself, which has let down on our sick planet two electronic angels capable of giving us back a possible humanity made of beauty and richness and this is the greatest magic of this huge album: may the dance be within us.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

11th September 2022

YOUTH

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_(musician)

GAUDI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaudi_(musician).

album smartlink: https://youthgaudi.lnk.to/stratosphere .