ISILDURS BANE - THE VOYAGE: A TRIP TO ELSEWHERE - 1992

A masterpiece of innovative chamber rock!

This wonderful album is just one (and probably the first real big one) of their great works which are supposed to come later on. They continued on here the way they started already on Cheval - Volonté de rocher towards highly intellectual and intricate music with many influences of classical and avant-garde music. It consists of several suites and two single tracks that are inspired once again by buildings or persons.

The suite "The Voyage" which has four parts and occupies most of the CD is inspired by the life and tales of the Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli, who spent more than half of his life in a mental hospital where he created paintings, compositions and fantasy tales. ISILDURS BANE got support for recording the suite by THE ZORN TRIO consisting of violin, cello and piano. This was a big help for them to create a kind of chamber rock ranging from fairground accordion sound over heavy guitars to really classical parts. On this album their music still remains in some way a bit more accessible compared to their later masterpiece MIND Vol.1 . The suite "Picassiette" describes a walk through the fields in more silent and acoustic compositions with some influences by jazz fusion. "La Sagrada Familia" is inspired by the famous cathedral in Barcelona and therefore has very much pastoral alike compositions with choirs. Some people will know already parts of The Voyage suite, "Nimis - Wotan's Tower" and "Das Junkerhaus" if they listened to the MIND Vol.2 album, but here these compositions can be enjoyed in their original versions sounding quite different from the live ones.

In general the compositions on here are more classically sounding than on MIND Vol.1 mainly due to the involvement of THE ZORN TRIO. But this is just one feature of the music, because there are rock elements as well which are not just added up but really merged with the chamber music to form a homogeneous unit. The band really managed on here to pull down the frontiers between "serious" classical and "popular" rock music. This album is really a very important and eponymous one, it is quite unique and very adventurious and innovative, but still accessible even for people who are more into rock and therefore I would call it a masterpiece in prog and like to rate it with five stars.
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