From the off ‘Tonal Glints’ by James A. McDermid is peppered with hoity-toity spice appeal in its synthesizer sheen about the place. Soft and focused hues spell interstellar gravitation like landing on the moon with rollerblades on. The fruit from booting up disk drives comes as a tuneful adage to the restorative space ambient hummus that is moreish and plentifully stocked in the ambient universe. What extrapolates James level from this record is going doolally with melody love.
James A. McDermid has here created music that is woozy and absorbant in its earworm drones, a noughties Steve Roach who has more of a focus on action over drift. The music paddles along in swathes of reverb until it reaches another wormhole in the cosmos. Brief drone oxygenation occurs a little at each turn; what this means for the listeners is an exciting set of deep and holistic musical graduals that are easy to follow and bri?liant to digest, swimming their way to spiritual execution.
There is a certain state of exegesis within the lines… a type of fractal poetry that breaks down expectations of where things are going next. It can be described as aspects of “chance, trance, goa music style” in the overall nomination of major and lack of suspended scales. Goa trance is like this drone example, in that sense; it is full of over-arched confluence, and that confluence – the ability to retain ideas – is the reason the music works so well.
What works best from “Tonal Glints” is its mature and researched enveloping of a pre-existing ambient sound palette. With choral vocals added to the mix here and there, the album approaches Hammock tenderness and anti-virtuous richness. While some might say it’s a little lost in it’s own shadow at present, give this stuff time – it could grow on you like a soft woolly jumper. Lovely heartwarming stuff, KrysaliSound sate electronic-acoustic sunshine with this release.