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BEYOND SENSORY EXPERIENCE (B.S.E.) - Faint

Format: CD
Label & Cat.Number: Cyclic Law 58th Cycle
Release Year: 2013
Note: second album by BSE on Cyclic Law, we think their most melancholic & emotional album so far, this lulls you into a deep deep sad trance between sleep and dream, working with fragile female voice, transformed piano sounds, etc.... so slow & touching...
Price (incl. 19% VAT): €13.00


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"With their new full-length album "Faint" Beyond Sensory Experience are back revisiting ghosts of the past to create memories of the future. Eleven divergent studies of transformation elements result in BSE’s most complete and intriguing album to date; full of liquid dark ambient soundscapes, salient samples and entrancing melodies. Hold your breath and close your eyes, when winter turns to water, day turns to Faint.

Edition of 500 copies in 4 panel digi sleeve with 12 page booklet. 11 Tracks. Running Time 60:00" [label info]



"They didn’t make us wait very long for a “Modern Day Diabolists” follow-up. Along with “Faint”, we have the opportunity once again to move away from the senses under the watchful eye of Drakh and K. Meizter. And because they’re fully fledged professionals, in this case also the trip on the edge of and even beyond the human self turns out to be very fruitful.

Fruitful, but somehow familiar. Our fellow Swedes have defined their specific path for quite a while, they have their own unique style and sound and are sticking to it, leaving the battering down of this already open door to younger and more hot-headed travelers. It’s an experienced project, their aforementioned style is usually recognizable after only a few sounds – “Faint” isn’t at all different. I think even woken up in the middle of the night it would take me maybe a few seconds to pinpoint whose creations are filtering from the speakers.

I never meant what those two nice Swedes do as dark ambient does. Certainly, the genre’s characteristics have always been to a larger or lesser extent present on previous albums, but they were never incorporating a typical, textbook darkness with particular relish. And with each consecutive release its amount becomes lesser and lesser. On “Faint” you practically won’t find the typical background-filling drones. This role is ascribed to either a stretched echo single guitar or piano tones (just listen to “Blank”), or simply silence which operates here on the same basis as the specific sounds, instruments, field recordings or samples. I always appreciated musicians who can play with silence.

As for the album’s atmosphere, I could actually copy-paste here what I wrote about “Modern Day Diabolists”. Ethereal, dreamy parts, mesmerizing in a way, sometimes serene (“Bystanders”), sometimes pulsating with a distant, uncertain threat (such as in my favorite piece, “Legacy”). Sometimes it feels as if the Swedes deliberately want to lull the listener, so that all external protective barriers are down and then hit with horror, war or apocalypse. But it never happens, though you never know what lies beyond the horizon.

Calm down, you can safely turn off for those few minutes. Beyond Sensory Experience doesn’t interfere with the bliss. It only gently wags its finger at us at times, saying that “next time there’s going to be a nightmare” (“Exhausted”), and we don’t have to believe the Swedes anyway. Probably in a year or two they’ll release another album, and again we’ll allow ourselves to be seduced by those ambient spaces, a pinch of post-rock atmosphere. We’ll smoke another cigarette, listening to the yearning, aching samples spoken in different languages… Another successful, very solid release by Beyond Sensory Experience and another – which one is it already – strong position in the Cyclic Law roster." [Stark/Santa Sangre]