Emotional Landscapes

Album review

This is a lovely set of highly moving ambient pieces with shades of rock, jazz, and classical thrown in for good measure. A veritable one-man show, Erik Wollo plays electric and acoustic guitars as well as synthesizers, and he also composes, arranges, produces, and programs. "Metaphor" features spooky interplay between weeping electric guitar and lonely gusts of wind, while "Prism" sounds like a typewriter struggling to compose underwater. Though some of the pieces are dissonant and reminiscent of space music, they aren't cold or distant, rather they contain plenty of emotional, melancholic elements. "Sounds of the Seen" begins with pretty cello melodies (courtesy of guest Liv Frengstad) that grow into complicated electronic passages until they vanish into crowd noises (which were recorded at the World Trade Center just days before the September 11th attacks). An adventure for the senses and a challenge for the heart, EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE lives up to its title.

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