For the third installment of their Encyclopedia of Civilizations series - a collection of split LP's where artists are offered the opportunity to explore insights into cultures other than their own - Abstrakce Records delves toward India with two absolutely stunning works of visionary, minimal ambience from Jonathan Fitoussi and Ariel Kalma.

Among the more fascinating byproducts of technological innovations - from transportation to recording - occurring over the last 100 or so years, has been the development of creative discourses between different cultures, often separated by great distances. Not only has this diminished long standing notions of exoticism (not to mention orientalism and cultural colonialism), but it has brought people together in remarkable ways, seeding multidirectional influence and inspiration, and with them singular new forms of art. Of these, occurring within the field of music, among the most important is India's conversation with numerous cultures across the globe, now the subject of the third volume of Abstrakce Records' The Encyclopedia of Civilizations series; in this case respective bodies of recording by Jonathan Fitoussi and Ariel Kalma, relating to India. An absolutely stunning cosmic, ambient journey that blends multiple pasts at the vanguard of contemporary musical practice.

It seems fitting that, when approaching the subject of India, Abstrakce Records' latest installment of The Encyclopedia of Civilizations series, the split offers attention between an older journeyman - Ariel Kalma - whose relationship with the country dates back nearly half a century, and a younger composer like Jonathan Fitoussi, who takes a more abstract and diffused position.

Kalma, with fans across nearly every spectrum of forward thinking and adventurous music, is one of the great pioneers of ambient music. Often closely associated with the new age movement, the saxophonist's roots in the avant-garde run deep, having worked extensively in experimental tape music and electronics at Groupe de Recherches Musicales during the 70s, around the time he departed with a one way ticket to India in 1974 to immerse himself in the country's culture and distinct musical traditions. These influences have run through his music ever since.

Jonathan Fitoussi is a French composer, a couple of generations behind Kalma, who also has close ties to Groupe de Recherches Musicales, but works largely within the field of analog and modular synthesis, veering heavily toward minimalist sound forms. He also co-runs the incredible imprint, Transversales Disques, that has been blowing minds over the last couple of years. His contribution to the LP, Veda, was composed & performed live at Gesu Church in Toulouse, France, during 2018, using the 1864 church pipe organ and an EMS SYNTHI synthesizer. The track takes an abstract approach to its subject, deploying readings about the Vedas - also at the root of a great deal of Indian classical music - as its inspiration, while bearing little aesthetic relation to music of the country. Drifting long tones and drones slowly modulate against intermittent pulses and deconstructed melodies, creating a warm, immersive field of sound - bristling with just the right amount of tension - that becomes elastic under the influence of the church’s natural reverb.

Kalma's contribution, Flute Meditation, is a blended hybrid of two works; the first recorded in 2017, played on a floating xaphoon mini sax, while the second was created in 1979, only a handful of years after his return from India, recorded with an Indian bamboo flute, saz, electric piano. The piece is just about as heavy as Kalma goes, plumbing the depths with a brooding meditation, tapping some fundamental, ancient, and profoundly human wellspring - beating with life - from which the very origins of music may have sprung. Built from modal flute melodies, polyphonic color, ambient space, and field recordings, Flute Meditation collapses the distinctions between the categories of electro-acoustic, biomusicology and ambient, with surprising effect that encounters Kalma at the absolute top of his game.

An absolute stunner from Abstrakce Records, the third installment of their Encyclopedia of Civilizations works wonders in the rethinking of the potential of contemporary music.