Sferi - 2012 - Sound of the Spheres

Quality: 4.5 out of 5
Trip-O-Meter: 5 out of 5

Howdy, everyone!  This is Dr. Schluss.  And when I want to trippily trip on down to Tripsville, nothing trips me out like this tripped out collection of trippy tunes!  The ambient onslaught of Sferi does a pretty fine job of bundling together several of my stranger obsessions.  Looking straight up at the title we've got the music of the sphere (er, 'sound'), so that's a check.  Not only does much of this sound like what they'd play for you in the planetarium to destroy your fragile, eggshell mind on the elementary school field trip, but a fair amount of it also sounds like what you'd hear in that dark, creepy room in the back with the dinosaur stuff.  And yeah, all of the psychedelic, world of sound crap that I usually ramble on about is perfectly present as well on this set of synthesized and found sounds.  At least that's what I think I'm hearing - I always dig music where I'm not quite sure what's going on.  I suppose my musical goal in the end is for extreme disorientation.  To me, that's the music of the spheres and that's what we've got on this set.

The tracks themselves take us on an ever evolving, orbiting journey on a trajectory out of the cosmos.  After some light industrial pummeling on "Merkur," Sferi goes the full Vangelis on "Venera."  Not that this is a problem.  If you're traveling into interstellar synth space, you'd be lost without your Vangelis and Sferi does that riff just as well as the bearded man himself did in his prime.  "Jupiter" is one of those tracks that tosses your brain onto a tray in the liquid nitrogen oven.  Getting back to the creepy dinosaur museum room, "Uran" puts your straight into that faux-primordial ooze before the cosmos finally opens up near the end of the track.  I dig everything here, but I'm not sure the delicate (if discordant) harpsichord tones on "Mars" quite live up to the god of war nomenclature.  But it's still perfectly groovy if you discount the title.

I'm down with Holst, but sometimes I want to glide through the solar system with a little less bombast.  This album is the place to be if space is the place for you and you're not in a Sun Ra mood.  The cover art is a touch geechy, but for the past ten years I've had random planetary stickers showing up in my guitar case, the back of my synthesizers, my suitcase, my backpack and so on.  I'm not sure where they cam from in the first place and I really don't know why they keep appearing.  I think I've thrown away Jupiter at least three times now.  Anyway, it makes me think of the album cover and I now think these events simply occurred to herald this album's appearance.  At least I think that's the simplest explanation.

You can download this collection at Sferi's bandcamp, which is here:
Sferi - 2012 - Sound of the Spheres