It is fair to say that Michael Regina has been around the block a time or two, musically speaking, and I mean that in the best sense of the meaning. But music was always on the cards, after all, not many four-year-old’s felt the seismic shift that The Beatles created; not many students tried their hand at as many instruments as he did, and few artists have explored as many different areas of music as he has.
Today, we find Regina delivering his stories through an array of ambient, new-age-infused, cinematic yet often groove-driven electronica; instrumentals that largely speak as eloquently, and indeed elegantly, through their sonic ebbs and flows as most do through the most poetic of lyrics—feelings and emotions as words and sentences.
The title track lays out the stall perfectly, a shimmering blend of beat and ambient beauty, a coming together of groove and grace, of neo-prog purpose and beguiling breezes of Gregorian voices, a chants encounter that makes us reminisce about the great work done by Michael Cretu under the mantle of Enigma.
And, as opening salvos go, it is only that, a first contact, and what follows is an adventurous and experimental, fascinating and forward-thinking journey through melodic and myriad electronic soundscapes. “Distant” is spacey in every sense, using minimal sounds to conjure images of spinning galaxies and a vastness almost beyond human comprehension. “Lost Cities” uses musical drift and sonic drama to remind us of those places where culture and civillization itself were lost to history, only to be occasionally rediscovered, and “The Gathering” is a shimmering slice of aural joy.
“A Place in Heaven” rounds out the album with a song that seems to encompass much of what has gone before and blends the analogue and the digital, the drifting and the defiant, the melodic with martial beats, as it builds to a perfect play-out crescendo.
It comes as no surprise that Michael Regina has a hard rock background and is influenced by bands such as Yes and Floyd, both of which are no strangers to the art of sound-scaping. For here, we find him doing the same, only relying on the beauty of binary’s ones and zeros rather than the acoustic physics of string and chord. Although it often feels as if this is music gathered from those liminial spaces where the tides of one wash up on the shores of the other.
Mystique is a gorgeous album, one that builds bridges, many, many bridges – between dance and deftness, cinematics and serenity, anthemics and more ambient artistry, between the old world aesthetic and the forward-thinking search for the sound of tomorrow.
It comes as no surprise that this is Regina’s 11th album; there is something in its construction, creativity, and sublime sound that suggests it is the work of a seasoned professional and talented sound-shaper. But then, as I said at the start, this is not Michael Regina’s first rodeo. Anything but!
Discover more from Dancing About Architecture
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
