Antonymes 'The Licence to Interpret Dreams' – Sonomu

Excerpt: “Welsh composer Ian M. Hazeldine, billed as Antonymes, pulled off a balletic balancing act between delicate and distinct, movement and rest with his short debut album ”Beauty Becomes the Enemy of the Future”, released 2009 on Cathedral Transmissions. With his third effort, he maintains that equilibrium admirably, with one huge slip-up. Inspired by Morton Feldman´s idiosyncratic description of music as a surface, Antonymes opens with ”A Fragile Acceptance”, nearly non-existent piano becoming engulfed in whispy clouds of strings which soon mass into a brace of rather muscular and insistent violins. As the album progresses, a genuinely exquisite dream state is maintained, sculpting with air or sitting and thinking aloud at the piano, all rendered with great eloquence. An odd but not oddly out of place piece entitled ”Doubt” appears midway through, in which one Jan Van Den Broeke recites a poem by one Paul Morley. I don´t know who either of these chaps are, but its weirdly halting, Dutch-robotic inflected cadence is somehow mesmerizing. Unfortunately, Hazeldine stumbles into overblown Emerson Lake and Palmer territory with ”The Door Towards the Dream”, which doesn´t get any better when a Rick Wakemanesque choir and keyboards section takes over. Pompous and sticky. This in striking contrast to the dignified, restrained chorale ”On Approaching the Strange Museum” with which the record ends.”

Sonomu