Icecake "... an ambient experience"
(Supple Records)

Behind the quite mysterious patronymic is hiding
Robert J.Kaminek Jr. a New Yorker musician and
songwriter whom, in the image of a great number of
his colleagues, is totally absorbed in his passion to
the point of multiplying the projects and this within
the scope of a more global approach of soothing music.
This point proves to be necessary to get for the best
all the aspects of Icecake's compositions because
Robert, having already written scores for two films and
various cable television programming, has enough
experience to know how to take up perfectly all the
sound space that instrumental music can offer. Such
new horizons are some godsends for all these
avant garde musicians whom are sometimes short of
huge and unexplored stretches.

If the first measures of "... an ambient experience" start
one thinking of an ethereal blend of space rock and
dreamy pop harmonies Robert has made a point of not
guiding the listener too much letting him be the sole
judge of the real nature he wants to grant this mixture.
The listener is quickly wrapped in an aural sweetness
("Vertical Pines", "Fountains", "On soft ground I sleep")
which instantaneously matches with the surreal image
of the infinitely great that flashes before him
("Pour Vous", "That train is so spacy", "Fountains").

But one can consider these seven tracks in an inversely
proportional way to the previous paragraph. Each
number might be a sort of phase of a long process of
introspection including some sessions of meditation
("Reality and You", "Fountains") that Robert surely
wanted to achieve for a long while now. The more the
record progresses the more the listener has it as his
duty to face up to some psychic interactions dithering
between positive cerebral waves ("Vertical Pines",
"That train is so spacy") which are a prelude to a
recovery and morenebulous consonances
("The astral body", "Pour Vous") which are the warning
signs of an irreversible decline towards autism
("Pour Vous", "The astral body") where the robot-like
vocals become the last connections to humanity.
Stressing the fundamentals of life and especially the thin
line between sanity and lunacy, "...an ambient experience"
is the deepest and strongest ambient record I have
listened to this year.

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