Odyssée – Arid Fields LP (Autoscopy Records)

“Arid Fields” is a recently released debut full-length album by Odyssée, a French multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer. His writing, composing, arranging, recording, and producing music techniques are impressive. He takes a primitive approach made with modern tools, resulting in a fresh and unique take on electronic music. Soundwise, Odyssée combines many music genres to illustrate such marvelous sonic imagery. Perhaps cinematic ambiance comes to mind first, but don’t be surprised if you stumble upon the fundamentals of retro and modern electronic music, experimental electronica, leftfield, synthwave, trance, and post-trance. Odyssée uses all these additional elements as more than necessary enhancements, accentuations, decorations, and other details to uplift these compositions on an entirely new level, while he remains loyal to the primary sonic direction. These experimentations with various styles resulted in a magnificent debut full-length that will appeal to even the pickiest electronic music fans.

It’s nearly mindblowing how Odyssée assembled all these tracks. Each composition has a perfect structure where every segment comes with many calm, soothing, relaxing, ethereal orchestrations. He thoroughly planned every theme, lead, melody, harmony, sequence, arpeggiated and regular chord progression. There’s a thick layer of equally complex, vividly hearable synth basslines that offer more than necessary heaviness, depth, and clarity. Still, Odyssée is not dedicated to cinematic ambient music only. Quite the contrary, you’ll stumble upon some numbers where he explores trance, post-trance, techno, and other more dynamic electronic music genres. You’ll notice how he planned all the intricate rhythmic structures, where every beat, break, fill, and other percussive maneuvers work to the advantage of such a colossal sound.

Of course, Odyssée focuses more on the ambient side of his music. His ability to incorporate so many melodic layers and force them to work to the advantage of these songs goes beyond comprehension many times throughout the entire album. His experience, knowledge, skills, talent, ideas, and musicianship shine in every moment of each song, proving he’s one of the best contemporary cinematic ambient and electronic music artists you’ll stumble upon nowadays. “Arid Fields” sounds marvelous from scratch to finish, thanks to all the time and ideas Odyssée invested into this fine piece of sonic artistry, and you’ll notice that the effort ultimately paid off as soon as you press play. “Arid Fields” sounds unlike anything you’ll hear in the modern electronic music scene today, and there lies the beauty of this material. Odyssée carefully composed, prepared, and planned every part of it, so you could listen to it today and realize it doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard before. It takes a lot of knowledge, ideas, and preparation to do such a thing, and this exceptional artist nailed it.

“Arid Fields” comes on a beautiful crystal clear with pink splatter vinyl, housed in a protective polyvinyl record sleeve. The cover artwork is also transparent, consisting of a photo negative that perfectly suits the vinyl record with all the neon pink and blue tones. You can grab this ambient masterpiece directly from Odyssée by visiting his Bandcamp page. Don’t miss it!