REVIEWS

© 2006 Phil Derby / Electroambient Space

Didymos is the Finnish musician Tommi Aatos Haavisto. Grief Distance is its second opus. An agreeably melodious album on obscure themes, like a sound screen of a horror movie which we listen to with imagination.
Vault begins Grief Distance on an atmospheric mood. A light circular piano emerges from a dark atmosphere and floats on a lugubrious cello. The movement is slow and grafts a hypnotic charm on a kind of counting rhyme, without words, which is whistled on a small blackness night where the sleep is absent. Hardly escape from a movement with ghostly flavours that Fundamentals of Grief brings us back there. Crystalline notes hop on a move which reverberates of its gravity. Intriguing, the impulse follows its road on a twisting sequence, flooded of heavy pulsations. The notes are agitated and whirled, breathless, on rolling and snapping percussions. A title with deep darkness. Like Mark Shreeve at his best. Felted and jerked percussions open The Calling. A beautiful small innocent title with superb tuneful layers, which hang to the first listening, on undulating bass which flies with heaviness. We find this bass sequential line on Arduous Distance. A superb title with astonishing heaviness which progresses on keys who wind like harp shoots and on vampiric layers. The percussions are sublimes. At the same time felted, piercing and vaporous, they nourish rhythm with originality, and fit to perfection the panoply of heteroclite sound effects. Elements which abound throughout Grief Distance.
After having slipped a small one with Blueberry Dance, Didymos correct his aim with the smoking dark Agonylog. Submarine sonar filters a coded communication by percussions with steam like stereophonic waves. A pulsation hops with resonance, feeding a heavy sequence. The movement crescende on enveloping layers, while preserving its spectral slowness. After atmospheric Mount of Olives , Anguish takes again the heavy rhythms with overwhelming percussions and a superb guitar which runs easily.
Mourning' s Over floats lazily on superb string chords layers. A title of a melancholic beauty who maintains the heavy momentum themes. Only Beneath the Promise Vault has a lighter approach, honeyed. A lacking tone title with delicate synth, in spite of the heavy subliminal slowness.

Grief Distance of Didymos is pleasant surprised. A melodious opus where Didymos shows capacity to create and maintain thematic atmospheres that have impact, causticity. There are several titles which hold my attention. Too many to enumerate them one by one, showing big bites out of Grief Distance. But if you like dark and dramatic atmospheres on superb melodies invigorated by brilliant percussions, if you miss Mark Shreeve’s heavy and delirious works, Grief Distance is the ideal album. Didymos! Another pearl to be discovered in this heteroclite universe which is the imaginary world of the ÉM.

- Sylvain Lupari / Guts Of Darkness; French Home of Dark & Experimental Music

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