The sun rises over the ruins, and deep in the bowl of the Pompeii amphitheater Les Stroud is making a hang-glider out of guitar strings and torn snare skins. As Les climbs from the ruins and sails out over the Gulf of Naples the amphitheater bursts into a thousand doves and seagulls, spiraling out to fill the sky.
This is the kind of imagery inspired by Mike Radice’s new album Revive, and the intensity of this curious instrumental concept album does not fade. The concept of Revive is that the Earth moves through a perpetual cycle of evolution, downfall, destruction, and revival. Utilizing production that combines countless analog and digital sources in a nearly 3D sonic landscape, Radice delivers on his ideas.
Although the album begins with the title track Revive — fittingly, as it is the beginning and the end of the cycle – the cycle itself begins with evolution, of the planet’s flora, fauna, and inevitably mankind. On Mammoth, Radice uses synths and shakers, counterpointed percussion, and the build of dark ambient undertones to cross millions of years of the planet’s life, from the relative peace of the ice ages through the dawn of mankind.
Radice then explores the cresting of civilization in a triptych that is the album’s centerpiece: Native, sparse and brooding, with bells and flutes that whisper warnings with the arrival of man; Ancestor, a double-time tempo crusade of hand percussion and dissonance that bridges the trilogy just as the missing link may have bridged human evolution; and Threshold, a seven-minute collapse into disturbing, contrary rhythms and simple, sublimely anachronistic piano phrasing that brings the track and the album to a new height of ominous declaration. These nineteen minutes carry us from the innocence of early mankind to the tipping point when man loses control of his environment and himself.
Hear Native:
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Radice builds and combines percussive counterpoints with analog and digital sources, creating edgy, intense dissonances that support the concept of this instrumental album with a clarity that is often difficult without a spoken story. On Become, Radice expands the album’s concept, sonics, and style even further. Become is the first track to feel somewhat casual, the end-of-the-world intensity lightened by far eastern instrumentation and trance-like, mid-tempo melodies. Become is the calm before the storm, the brief space wherein mankind must make his peace.
Hear Become:
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Entropy is the way of all things and inevitably claims all but The Last Tribe. The track opens with a casual sense of humor as Radice utilizes more of his unique instrumentation to portray a cowboy country feel, a campfire song unlike any heard before, that quickly changes as the final alarm tolls, a sound at the heart of this ten-minute epic that recalls the chilling ululation of H.G. Wells’ Martians as they exulted in victory on Earth; but instead of science-fiction destruction, the track becomes open-eyed and optimistic, as if the last tribe has corrected our path just in time…alas, the breezing synths that speak of redemption merely hide the plot twist: An asteroid rushing in, a deux ex machina that cleanses the Earth of mankind’s existence.
Asteroid closes the album with sixteen minutes of excellent dark ambient anticipation, the soundtrack to an aerial view of a decimated world. As Asteroid comes to an end, there is a juxtaposition of feeling, of closure, yet of something left to do….
Hear The Last Tribe
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Which is why one must enjoy the title track of Revive at both ends — hearing Revive open the album calls up images of the dawn of time; hearing Revive at the close of Asteroid brings Radice’s concept full-circle as the driving rhythm, mantra-like bass, glistening percussion, and building synths call up a storm of life; rebirth; revival.
Hear Revive
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Revive by Mike Radice is available for immediate download from the Atmoworks Store.
