Maitreya

Artist: Maitreya
P: 2004
Inspired by location and time, .74 is a warm, animate landscape of rich atmospheres moved by a swell and pulsing of sound. With the beautiful depths and resonance of Escent, the glitchy, hypnotic repetition of Pulse and Beat and the mellow pads of Aurora, this album is a satsfying and cohesive whole, featuring the unique Maitreya sound that is becoming so well recognised.

Artist: Maitreya
P: 1999
This Album is dedicated to the end of one life and the beginning of another. More than just dark ambient with drones and long soundscapes, the music has a feeling.

Artist: Maitreya
P: 2003
Maitreya's (a.k.a Simon Lomax) second album sees the theme move from space and aliens - From the Mothership was his first album - back down to Earth.
At first I thought that "telluric" was a made-up word for the album; however, curiosity prompted me to check only to discover that it is actually a word and pertains to the Earth.
The word "waves" in the title of this album is no mere intellectual reference, on every one of the eight tracks there are waves of sound flowing in and out of the soundscape. After a while this can have a slightly disorienting effect, leaving the listener feeling like he's been mentally moved about on a sea of sonic impressions. Like many ambient albums, there's a journey element to Telluric Waves; these explorations take us from underground in "subterranean" and up into the clouds with "altocumulus".
A heaviness pervades the album. It's not dark in the sense of being overtly unsettling or eerie, despite there being aspects of life to be heard it sometimes it made me imagine the Earth in an earlier time of its history when life was just starting to evolve. Though musically different, it reminded me of the way Steve Roach's On This Planet evokes primeval feelings and connections to the Earth.
Paradoxically, there's also a kind of warmth (maybe analogue synths and/or heavily processed sounds are used) to many of the sounds, particularly the washes that keep breaking over the soundscape.
Sonic waves are often coupled with effects to bring out a particular atmospheric feeling. For instance, in "Subterranean", cascading sounds like dripping are heard, as are distant snatches of sound which could be voices or something more sinister lurking in the darkness.
Voice samples of various kinds can be heard throughout the album, and usually they are distant and ghostly as in "altocumulus" and "half-light" - as though life is seen only from afar or glimpsed through a static garbled radio signal.
Apparently this album took nearly four years to create. That's a long time, but ambient fans will surely find that it's been worth waiting for. It's one to be really savoured and revisited to discover sounds you may not have noticed on previous listens.
Dene Bebbington / Wind & Wire