Review Summary: Too confident to be experimental, Terry Riley's masterpiece captures the structure of a beautiful dream and the mystery of an otherworldly incantation.
Sometimes, what you write about music feels uninspired because it fails to give the reader an accurate impression of the listening experience. Everyone can write inciting things about an album, but few can surprise the feeling inspired by the listening session, by the album’s arrangement, and by its spirit, because an album is a living thing, a sentiment, and an expression. So, the criticism often feels arid and uninspired, as it lacks spark. Also, a review rarely fits its tone with the album’s sound, appearing a discrepancy between the opinion and the musical essence.
The ultimate difficulty comes when writing about instrumental albums that are based only on the atmosphere. When they're lacking a captivating background story, they are often criticized only from the prism of their importance, innovation, and, unfortunately, music theory. Such an album is "A Rainbow In Curved Air", a record that attracted a great deal of well-written reviews. Sadly, almost all of them fall to immortalize the musical atmosphere, the breath of every note, and the ecstasy of the work, because "A Rainbow In Curved Air" is an ecstatic contemporary classical piece that feels at first like a divine revelation, as a transcendental atmospheric exercise formed by spirals of synths.
Before listening to the album, I read some reviews and they all were praising the work's innovative character. Their general message inclined towards its importance, refusing to capture the brilliance of every sound, the lightweight musical passages that enrich a revelatory composition. This discrepancy between written word and sound often distances potential listeners from this record's sheer wonder, because "A Rainbow In Curved Air" is a bewitching creation on its own and not just a piece of musical history.
"A Rainbow In Curved Air" can be perfectly described as an album of perception. Every sound constitutes a part of a compact and borderless sensation, benefiting from beautiful sound accuracy and crystal soundscapes. Its flawless organization gives elegance to the ideas and separates the work from the "experimental" etiquette. Also, the precise nuances pave the way for a compact, but soulful musical expression. With such a great background, the only obstacle that stands between the listener and the musical essence is the sound’s nature. Today, 8-bit music is so famous that comparisons between "A Rainbow In Curved Air" and the vintage Arcade game soundtracks are inevitable. So, the listener may feel that he doesn’t listen to so-called "serious music", but to an interesting experiment at its best, an impression that detracts him from the musical message.
For those who can ignore the eventual comparisons, "A Rainbow In Curved Air" opens an unknown landscape. The music evokes the air above the waterfalls, the water drops that reflect rainbows. An image of ethereal calm surrounds the listener and catches him in the meshes composed of rarefied sounds. An otherworldly synth avalanche continues the introduction, formed from a deep rhythmic suite. These two traits create a tonal landscape of revelatory nuances possessing an enlightening power. After the song finishes, the first impulse is to give Side A another spin. The sounds will enrich once again the room and our inner selves.
The album’s other song is "Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band", a moment that might have been more influential than the opener. The parallel between its sax-driven sound and the future atmosphere of Soft Machine’s "Third" and the Canterbury scene is so obvious that we are haunted by its phantomatic harmonies, which close the album with a note of pointed despair. If "A Rainbow In Curved Air" has the air of divine music, "Poppy Nogood" feels more human, like a contradiction between heaven and flesh. This contrast further underlines the album’s emotional complexity, distancing it from the experimental character pointed out by some critics.
Finally, Terry Riley sketches the bridge between what is human and immortal with an atmosphere descended from a paradisiac realm. As I said in the introduction, words are not enough to describe its magnetic field, but at least they can express the contraction between the divine and the human, an idea on which the album composed its floating message—a message that still evokes the colors of a rainbow that exceed our immediate horizon.
