Artist: Janne Hanhisuanto
Album: Water Stories

Released: 14 November 2010
Label: Earth Mantra

Janne Hanhisuanto Water Stories
On Water Stories (51'02") Janne Hanhisuanto embraces the power of simplicity and realizes a gently harmonious, very calming, very bewitching album. In just a few moments of music one feels transported to another plane. While the eight track titles refer to Water Stories' aquatic theme, the interior human mind is truly the landscape of this work. Hanhisuanto's swirling inventiveness touches on a variety of ambient mystiques and atmospheric inclinations. From mysterious darkened soundscapes and expanding synthesizer structures to compositions of languid guitar riffs and engaging melodies, each piece is a complex tone poem with its own distinctive color and climate. The layers change as you listen to them causing these liminal, threshold spaces to seem ever-fluctuatinging - imagistically rhyming with a churning sea or the rushing tide. Throughout this wonderful release Hanhisuanto effectively mixes in field recordings of water currents with ethereal synth emanations and swelling string chords - pairing notes as well as he pairs sounds. This music soars on the imagination of the composer over an invisible sea of ideas. With its infinite sense of something unfolding Water Stories leaves as much to the imagination as it reveals.

- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END   9 December 2010


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