Banco de Gaia
Maya

THE REVIEW

Homage to an ancient civilization, "Maya" was released in 1994 and is the first complete work by Banco de Gaia. The previous ones bear the mark of clandestinity: three albums distributed on tape and soon withdrawn from circulation due to the wild use of samples for which the rights had not been paid; and an EP, "Desert Wind", the first true record release in 1993 for the independent Planet Dog Records.

Behind the imaginative name Banco de Gaia hides not a group of several elements, but the solitary British musician Toby Marks, one of the most original representatives of the evolution that electronic music underwent in the '90s. His style is very personal (between ambient dub and chill out, for those who love categories), injecting massive doses of samples of Arabic or Middle Eastern music onto a very rhythmic electronic background in which keyboard melodies stand out. And, constantly, an underlying exoticism in the choice of themes and titles.

Take, for example, "Gamelah," the fourth of the nine tracks that make up this album (72 minutes in total duration): here the vocal extracts are taken from "Musica rituale di Bali", published by the Institute of Musicology of the University of Basel. It is often like this in Banco de Gaia’s music: where the human voice is present, it is treated as an acoustic fact, stripped of its connotations of meaning, yet laden with cultural and emotional references.

In the opening track, "Heliopolis," it is the voice of Lisa Gerrard from Dead Can Dance that is sampled but the context, this time, is between trance and dance, not being difficult to listen to. In some moments very dense, yes, but Banco de Gaia always maintains a stylistic hallmark that aims at the pleasantness of sound, and Toby Marks does not want to assault the listener but rather to seduce them, as befits his human-faced electronic music.