The Los Angeles-based artist and producer Cyrus Reynolds creates his music around the orchestral composition and modern songwriting, crafting a cinematic and dramatic ambient.
In 2013, the artist launched his debut EP In Passing EP, a 5-piece collab with Steve Gibbs, the modern ambient musician and film composer, placing Cyrus on his path. Four years after, the LA-based artist launched a new EP in collaboration with the producer Gregg Lehrman and many other artists, highlighting his big friend Novo Amor in Oh Brother, a cinematic and emotional ambient composition, remembering Bon Iver‘s second album compositions, with a close to perfection arrangement for brass and strings, combining with his almost angelical voice.
The second EP was a trigger for his last studio-album Love in a Perfect Vacuum, edited last December 7th, another collab work, ending a great year for the composer and songwriter, after presented Foraker, accompanied with a video, a deeper and more experimental song, due to the participation of S. Carey, drummer and co-founder of Bon Iver, exploring back-vocals, echoed drums and spacial guitars.
Love in a Perfect Vacuum is definitely a trip one takes. Starting slowly in a smooth crescendo for New Ground, where a shrill violin is the protagonist before the first verse sang by Chamois who gives an epic ascendant to the whole track. This is probably one of the best opening tracks ever.
It’s easy to understand where this is all going to. But then When You Call begins and it upraises all the expectations. On the background it sounds like a continuing part of New Ground but more energetic. Supported by the drum set and a keyboard sample, what appears to be “just” another ambient song reveals to be a new pop-tronic dramatic song. It all makes sense when it reaches its pitch in the chorus. “We’re not the only ones” sang by BELLSAINT works as a motto for the whole song and then the climax abruptly comes to an end, like a run into the woods and suddenly reaching a glade.
And that glade is Finder, the 3rd track out of this 6-piece EP. It’s the first song where Cyrus’ piano has protagonism. It’s incredible how amazingly his sustained piano sounds harmonizing with the almost-staccato string set. Cyrus Reynolds can’t resist auto-tunning and this is one of the cases when it’s well used. The deepness it gets with auto-tune creates a coherent environment, the whole album works as one single piece (should we say masterpiece?) as its goes from one song to another.
End Of Days follows the same instrumental guideline (like there was one) fortifying the idea of a single piece, almost broken in chapters, going back to the idea that this EP is a trip, traveling from place to place with the perfect soundtrack. Cyrus hardly puts apart his piano and strings arrangements, designing a marvelous and fantastic world, which is love from is perspective.
End Of Days precedes Infinite Glow, and exactly as it happened in the second track, this is once again more dynamic, electronic and pop-ish, laid on samples and strong drums, where Chamois extols his voice one more time.
In the sixth and last epic song Cyrus Reynolds borrows a mellow and round male vocals, singing his soul out in Human. Collaborating in songwriting with the post-rock band Bird & The War this one mixes, possibly, the best brass & string arrangement of all 6 songs. The band’s frontman Chris James begins placing is deep voice among the violins and cellos, establishing his similarity with Bon Iver in musicality and their frontman Justin Vernon in vocals. But Reynolds goes further: his music flies higher. Even though the lyrics says “Got my feet on the [New] ground” this record is always ascending, it is put on a mystic and fantastic place, it combines depth with levitation, physical with abstract, angelical with human.
Even though is only a 6-track album, the feeling is that is enough. In fact the storytelling is so well designed and performed that the only thing we can wish for is to be able to listen to this over and over again.
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