Lightwave
Tycho Brahé

THE REVIEW

“Astronomy is the poetry of the heavens”.

This statement of intent, placed within the album, served as the guiding star for the Lightwave in their astral journey to the edges of the universe.

Inspired by the life and philosophy of Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer who lived in the second half of the 16th century, the French ensemble mapped a course where electronic, ambient, psychedelia, and chamber music coexist in a sound stream where the elongation of time and the countless cosmic nuances in continuous ferment and evolution act as inexhaustible propellants for the interstellar ship.

Among the most interesting realities of the last twenty-five years regarding the development of experimental electronic music (and beyond), the Lightwave have managed to give their navigation a quid of materiality and emotionality that has made the explored galaxies extremely tangible and alive. This very characteristic is the "secret beauty" of the record which, along with the subsequent "Mundus Subterraneus," represents the peak of their career.

The "Sirius" of the album is the colossal "Uraniborg," which was the name of the futuristic astronomical observatory located on a Danish island and managed by Tycho Brahe. Besides studying the immense celestial depths, he surely loved them, and the sublime violin scores merging with the cosmic magma almost seem like the emotional oscillations of the Danish astronomer intent on scrutinizing constellations and imagining worlds on distant planets.

The pieces where the violin is present are, for the writer, the most successful: the refined and spectral "Cathedral" (almost a Kosmic-Music chamber piece) and the ecstatic and ascensional "Apogée" are brilliant examples.

But the album also thrives on great moments of pure electronic music: the conciliatory "Mapping the Sky" embellished with tiny drops of piano; the glacial "Fuga Stellarum" where the stars seem to communicate with each other in an unknown language; the "colorful" "Poetics of the Sphere" where spurts of fountain water are flecked by lights of suns and satellites not of this world.

A special mention goes to "Tycho on the Moon" (the most psychedelic piece), which is nothing more than a premonitory dream of the astrologer seeing himself at the control panel of a future spaceship, and for the concluding "Hymn for the Guild of Astronomers" where the intertwining of electronics and a Turkish clarinet creates a mood of strong awareness.

The sonic blend of Lightwave has over time become an indispensable cornerstone for other star navigators to follow, and this is also, in the end, another correlation with Tycho Brahe: his most important assistant was a certain Johannes Kepler.