Antonymes
The License To Interpret Dreams

THE REVIEW

If there's someone who has learned and embodied Brian Eno's "non-musician" theory, it's definitely Ian M. Hazeldine, a Welsh photographer and designer who hides behind the alias Antonymes.

Faced with an "ambient" album of this type, rather than ambient music, the definition of landscape music seems more fitting.

It's an album that has been written with the heart and with that attention to detail that probably only a "non-musician" is capable of. During listening, one can find similarities with port-royal's Flares or Leyland Kirby's monumental The Future Is No Longer What It Was. I don't think the aforementioned artists know each other or were able to draw inspiration from each other's works. It seems easier to think that artists who don't solely deal with music actually have a sort of shared sensitivity, allowing them to create works belonging to the same genre without necessarily having shared a common artistic journey. Can you imagine what could have happened in the opposite scenario?

Anyway, "The License To Interpret Dreams" is an album to be listened to with the eyes as well as the ears. It's nostalgic, dreamy, and pervaded by piano notes and neoclassical arrangements. There are languid and ghostly spoken word pieces, and there are also scattered drones here and there.

To be listened to in one breath, and in the end, I feel like saying that if there is a definition of romantic ambient, this album is its essence.