David Wright Continuum Play: Lo-Fi   Mid-Fi   Hi-Fi   Download: Lo-Fi   Mid-Fi   Hi-Fi (Excerpt from track 'Cassini') Please go to the Store to buy this item.

After 2002's superb 'Walking with Ghosts' we now have David Wright's fifteenth solo album and I guess that means we shall increasingly see the word 'veteran' appear in reviews of 'Continuum'. Purposefully and wisely avoiding a 'Ghosts' Part 2 scenario, David has instead elected to return closer to his E.M. roots with 5 extended pieces which venture more into cosmic 'electronic space music'.

The first track is the shortest cut at 11minutes and 14 seconds and starts with brooding cosmic colours, and NASA voices before a gentle minimalist piano and sampled female voice prelude a rumbling bass, sequences and rhythms which ebb and flow slowly, evolving against a backdrop of expansive textures and subtle melodies.

Perhaps, more than the rest of the album, 'Dark Matter' is reminiscent of Code indigo, as it features the vocal but on the eponymous 'Continuum' David develops his chilled out electronica into an extended 19.44 cosmic opus. Brooding, formless, space atmospherics begin the piece when at around the 2.30 mark a heavenly backdrop and a gently pulsing 3 note sequence accompany a simple melody which weaves in and out of the mix in various forms as the composer improvises and adds layers of colour and rhythmic invention, building and deconstructing. At 11.50 the rhythms become more insistent, with full choir and eventually strings adds grandeur before the cosmic effects towards the close. 'Bridge of Souls' is a much more brooding, impressionistic tone poem and a change in direction with a touch of organ giving the piece an early TD, even prog rock ambience. A slow burner this one but well worth persevering with. Cross-fading into 'Island of Flight' we return into more familiar, charted space, with sampledf guitar rhythms, gentle piano, cosmic mbellishments and gradually evloving melodic colour, sequences and hypnotic stereo effects, before the gentle 'come down', or 'landing' at the close. Cross fading into the final part of the musical odyssey 'Cassini' clocks in at over 22 minutes and is the most uplifting, optimistic piece on the album.