Magic Sound Fabric Album: Uplift Drift  (NEW Release! Nov 5 2002)

Reviews:

By Matt Howarth - Sonic Curiosity:

Comfortable percussives establish an uptempo demeanor for these melodic electronics, while elegant keyboards dole out measures of pep laced with soothing attitudes. These percussives stem from traditional drums and bongos as well as crackling E-perc. Basslines inject a sultry undercurrent that is further enhanced by sneaky guitar licks that sizzle softly in the mix and create an ethereal excitement. Synthesized horns enliven a few passages with their regal warble, nicely counterparted by the pensive resonance of piano. Textures of sparkling consistency lurk beneath these vibrant elements, providing a tasty foundation of atmospheric quality for the music's refreshing and stimulating vitality.

This music excellently bridges galactic sensibilities with earthbound sentiments. The astral airs are grounded by the savory rhythms, rendering solid parallels between the outward urge and the security of familiar terrain. Expansive regions become compressed into regions that mirror the potential of the human mind.

These solid compositions exhibit an intriguing fusion of funk with ambience, resulting in a highly appealing sound that is exhilarating with peaceful grooves. While the general mode is easy-going, this relaxation is tempered with a pleasant power that churns and seethes, tantalizing the audience with rhythmic melodies that uplift while maintaining an amiable drift.

By Bill Binkleman - Wind and Wire:

Uplift Drift is a solid collection of chill/dub-style ambient tracks, courtesy of Cameron Akhunaton, who records as Magic Sound Fabric. Fans of earlier Waveform compilations (such as the A.D. series) will find a lot on this album to enjoy, I suspect. The music has that same highly polished sound with lots of breezy synths, kinetic beats (both electronic and organic in nature), sexy melodies and sensuous rhythms, all of it superbly engineered and mastered to produce an energetic brand of chillus maximus. While not a truly "relaxing" style of chill-out music, Uplift Drift is still plenty laid back in spots and never gets hyperkinetic in its rhythms.

Track titles give an indication of the futuristic slant to the synthesizers employed by Akhunaton. "Levitation Groove" starts the party out with snazzy jazzy synth horns, earthy hand drums, and finger-popping snares and high hats. The nine-minute long "Photonic Phonic" opens with a juxtaposition of crickets (!) with Berlin-esque laser synths, before the beats (reminiscent of artists like A Positive Life and Pentatonik) and silky synth strings carry you off on a cushion of cyberspace tuneage.

The remaining seven tracks all offer something to recommend them, in varying degrees. As I stated above, Akhunaton knows how to expertly layer his keyboards and rhythm tracks and he delivers a ton of dancy, semi-trancy, always groovy ear candy throughout Uplift Drift. I dug the opening scratch beats and later hip hop rhythms on "Astro Dream Stream" played out against a backdrop disco-fied guitar licks and ethereal synth notes. Admittedly, not everything was a big hit with me, though. I wasn't overly fond of "My Thoughts Have Become Visible" even with its cool tribal hand percussion elements and mysterious echoed piano - it was a little too much of an island jam-track for me, with lots of synth horn work. But kicky cuts like "Dimension Shift" featuring blooping/bleeping synth effects, downtempo snare beats and cyber-jazzy piano and lush strings picked me right back up again.

I don't know if this is Magic Sound Fabric's (Akhunaton's) first effort. If it is, it's an amazingly strong debut. Uplift Drift is a confident and accomplished recording of beat-driven electronic ambient music. While the music is a little too revved up at times to be labeled as 100% chill-out (as I view it), it may just be a matter of semantics (one man's chill is another's dance music, so to speak). The album is a lot better than some recent efforts from Waveform (I think it¹s also better than any of the A.D. compilations, which have not dated well, in my opinion). If you liked those CDs and are looking for the next step in dub-style ambient music with a degree of chill to it, Magic Sound Fabric has just what the music doctor ordered. Recommended." Bill Binkleman - Wind and Wire

"Funky bass riffs and sassily downbeat rhythms inject a cool spy-theme-like presence into Levitation Groove's lighter ethereality. Similarly blending active perkiness with sinuous vaporstrands, Photonic Phonic (9:00) writhes in big swirling coils are peppered with rippling lows and percussive hits. Dubby pulses and deep beats propel Astro Dream Stream (5:18) into the astral/dreamy/streamy realms indicated.

Over hovering streams, sprightly brass sounds and a burbling bass are prominently revealed as My Thoughts Have Become Visible. Piano tones twinkle like stars above the elasticized lows of Octave Surfing, while faint drumbeats spatter. The voices of Space Traffic Control are intermittently heard in a final flourish of rhythmically resonant drum-n-drift which is laced with guitar-like jangles and distant flutations.

Consistently smooth aural tapestries from Magic Sound Fabric waft in curtains of beat-driven ambient floes; take an Uplift Drift into intoxicating soundworlds that are everything their title implies. Sweetly grooving stuff!" -AmbiEntrance.org



The new CD by Magic Sound Fabric, Uplift Drift, is a cinematic journey that " Lifts you up and takes you higher" Full of images and smooth, solid grooves that transport the listener to a place where you have the freedom to lean back and float or get up and move to the ambient groove.

Reviewed by Roger Foote of Distant Waves

"Uplift Drift" is a great ambient album which got my head nodding almost immediately after pressing play. The easy, rolling beats keep this album moving nicely along, interwoven with a more oldschool ambient synth sound.

The tracks that really stood out on this album were "Photonic Phonic", a lively ambient track with good sequencing, and "Galaxy Rise", an excellent track -- an excellent mix of ethereal ambient sounds with piano and solid beats. This album is ending up in my ambient music stack right next to Global Communication. - DJ Dusty Downtempo.org

Magic Sound Fabric Album: Unfold ( Released 1998 )

Unfold was inspired by my seven-month self-exploratory retreat in Sedona, Arizona. To me the album is a historical documentary of my transition into a clearer understanding of my relationship to All-That-Is. It was through this piece of work that I made my passage from my trusty 4-track recorder and cheap sampler to an advanced computer based recorder . It is symbolic of my mind expansion towards greater understanding of this wild cosmic matrix we call the Universe. I've tied together my favorites from the few years of recording back in '95.

View art from the CD / Lyrics