Search - Shulman :: Endless Rhythms of the Beatless Heart

Perhaps the best of it's genre

Aditya Advani | Los Angeles, CA | 12/14/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Everybody into psy-ambient is a big fan of repeat. You play the album over and over again - the joy for the listener lies in both in the harmonies and shifting basslines, but additionally in deciphering the subtleties of the swoops and bells and strings and changing melodies and infusing them with meaning and if possible an overarching story or trip. In that regard, Endless Rhythms is a masterpiece - I cannot stop shy of proclaiming it a symphony! A beautiful and nuanced electro psy mind melter - you really rubik cube this album as you listen to it over and over.



The one thing this album is not is "chill" - it grabs you and takes you on an all out psychedelic trip. For me I see the trip being the journey of a spaceship soaring into the center of a universe that could alternatively be an nanoship surfing a biological organism - the beatless heart as it were. You ride along the thread at a furious pace, but your perspective of that speed keeps changing. Perhaps these are the rhythms of the beatless heart?



Your perspective shifts from experiencing the journey in the third person to passenger and then finally embodiment as the ship itself, and then back out the other side to an inner perspective (I once imagined myself as the ship computer's 3D UI while passing through a particular spot in the album); finally you are led to a place where you (led by Yaniv Shulman the piper) burst out of the cloudy mystery of why you are where you are (the brilliant track "Invention") and overcome the insolubility of existential questions, finding sanctuary in dance and peace in ritual (the marvelously upbeat folk song turned ambient masterpiece Mia Nihta Mono Den Ftani) followed by a brief prayer that serves as a paean to self realization or rebirth that marks the end of an excellent trip. This album is a celebration of complexity. You start out by appreciating it in wonder, navigating it blindly for sheer sensation, until you end up so converted that you bathe dance and pray to it.



Shulman's had better tracks on his previous album Random Thoughts, deeper and more subtle, more vocal and even more psy. But as a complete work, Endless Rhythms of the Beatless Heart is my #1 psy-ambient album ever and for good reason. As an acid album, I put it in near orbit of Dark Side of the Moon, right above Random Thoughts and another Aleph Zero masterpiece, Omnimotion's Dream Wide Awake."