Iury Lech’s second album, Música Para El Fin De Los Cantos (‘Music For The Finish Of The Songs’), has taken some time to achieve its viewers. Initially launched by Spanish label Hyades Arts, which was run by author and director Antonio Diaz and musician Dr Héctor, its understated magnificence ultimately attracted a wave of bloggers who have been taken with albums that slipped between genres, sitting because it does between minimalism, New Age and Fourth World musics. Reissued 5 years in the past by CockTail d’Amore, with altered paintings, for this reissue, Wah Wah and Lech have gone again to the grasp tapes and restored the unique cowl.
Lech, a multi-disciplinary creator of Ukrainian origin, recorded the album throughout 1989 and 1990, whereas he was based mostly in Barcelona. Certainly, he’s spent most of his life in Spain, pursuing an unpredictable profession that’s taken in music, movie, literature and multimedia – his first album, 1989’s cassette-only Otra Rumorosa Superficie, drew from soundtracks to a number of of his early-’80s movies. His music, wealthy with mild, poetic synthesis and luxuriant, slow-moving melody, additionally sat notably properly inside a broader scene in Spain that explored the nexus of post-industrial, post-minimalism, and nascent techno/electronica, and Música Para… nestles neatly alongside contemporaneous work from the likes of Esplendor Geometrico, Miguel A Ruiz, Adolfo Nuñez, Pep Llopis, José Luis Macias, Finis Africae, Orquesta De Las Nubes and Mecanica Common.
“Cuando Rocío Dispara Sus Flechas” (“When Rocío Shoots Her Arrows”) opens Música Para… with dizzy arpeggio patterns, suggesting the Berlin College relocated to sunnier climes. However as with a lot of Música Para…, Lech quickly takes this composition in different instructions – languid but piercing high-pitch tones repeatedly rupture the floor of “Cuando Rocío…”, lending it a tense magnificence, as electrical piano spirals and descends into the music’s silences. “Barreras” (“Obstacles”) follows, a chime-scape of clacking, glistening textures, see-sawing a easy chord change over a whirring hum, its mild grandeur suggesting the Cocteau Twins’ “Lazy Calm”, from their 1986 album Victorialand, if it had been organized by Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro.
If “De La Melancolia” (‘Of Melancholy’) performs out loosely like a variation on a theme – mobile melodies repeating over pulsing drones that trace at pure phenomena and shape-shifting, rhizomatic networks – “Ukraïna” (‘Ukraine’), the album’s centrepiece, is extra private, internalised, a 17-minute hymn to Lech’s household house that shimmers in pellucid gentle, an artificial choir singing wordless, ghostly chants; it has an identical sense of ‘epic stasis’ as Popol Vuh’s “Vuh”, from In Den Gärten Pharaos, however this feels just like the ecstatic afterglow. By the point we attain the astral analgesic of the closing “Postmeridiano” (‘Afternoon’), Música Para…’s sanctified atmosphere has finished its work: time has slowed to a crawl, however blissfully so.
