Max Corbacho is an independent artist born in the southwest of Spain, in the province of Badajoz. This enormous land sprinkled of oaks where he was born and he spent the first years of his life, is perhaps the deeper track than marks his music. Starred nights of summer, the caress of the nocturnal breeze, the sedative song of the crickets, immense horizons,  deeply blue skies and silence.

The extremely dense and hypnotic sonic landscapes of Max Corbacho are a constant reference to these elements, elements which condense and act as catalysts, pointing to the essence of the great and ineffable mystery of our existence. Corbacho's s musical expression has the ability to enter us in this wonderful mystery.

His musical trajectory began, after making guitar studies, in local rock bands and, after some years like a guitar player, slowly become interested in electronic music. First with legendary bands like Tangerine Dream or musicians such as Richard Burmer and Vangelis. Later, his influences include artists such as Brian Eno, Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Vidna Obmana, Alio Die, Michael Stearns.

In 1999, his first work, Vestiges was produced. Soon the prestigious online store Backroads Music chose this album as one of the best of 2000, and Vestiges became one of the more highly praised Space-ambient CDs around that time. Vestiges was considered a sincere, touching, powerful work, full of mystery.

In the year 2000 Max published his second CD, Far Beyond The Immobile Point, followed by The Resonant Memory of Earth, published by the North American label "Space For Music". Further releases include Nocturnal Emanations, Indalo and Moontribe - each one larger and more accomplished than the last.

The album The Talisman is yet another step forward. Here the artist explains "I have tried to create all the songs of this work "inside" my synthesizers exclusively, inside this deeply isolated world, an amniotic-like inner space that develops in the synth and multi-effects circuits, without insert any "external" element except for the voices in the first song. Also, I have experimented more and more with long, spacious reverbs and looping treatments ". Thus, the "oceanic" nature is strengthened, creating an atemporal quality, suspended in time and space, without rare elements disrupting the internal balance and natural flow of harmonic streams. No tempo, no synchronization, maybe only the breathing and the pulse of the artist."

Max Corbacho's last albums follow the progression into deep, silken ambiance set by The Resonant Memory of Earth and The Talisman. Albums like 2009's Ars Lucis and, over the next three years, Deep Time, Lost Links, and the double album The Ocean Inside, continued a commitment to ethereal atmospheres even less concerned with traditional forms and melody. The year 2015 brought both Future Terrain and Splendid Labyrinths. With a playing time of over 70 minutes, an expanded version of Future Terrain was released in early 2017 and followed later in the year by Nocturnes, Arte Magnetica and the last Source Of Present.


Discography:
 
SOURCE OF PRESENT (2017)
ARTE MAGNETICA (2017)
NOCTURNES (2017)
SPLENDID LABYRINTHS (2015)
FUTURE TERRAIN (2015)
THE OCEAN INSIDE (2012)
BIOMA (2012)
LOST LINKS (2011)
DEEP TIME  (2010)
ARS LUCIS  (2009)
BREATHSTREAM  (2008)
THE TALISMAN  (2006)
MOONTRIBE  (2004)
INDALO  (2003)
NOCTURNAL EMANATIONS  (2003)
THE RESONANT MEMORY OF EARTH   (2002)
FAR BEYOND THE IMMOBILE POINT  (2000)
VESTIGES  (1998)

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Antonymes : In Formation

Antonymes music emerges from the adjustments and erasures of ambient, the pace and persistence of minimalism, where music expresses nothing but itself, from the serenity and austerity of Morton Feldman and the profound prettiness of Harold Budd, from the relationship between continuity and repetition rather than of contract and interplay, from secrecy, from quietness, from pause, from thought, from emptiness, from time, from far off, from itself, from where it is set and where it is setting off to.   
 
“My chief aim is to make a piece of music. You make it for yourself firstly, and then if other people want to join in, then there we are.”
 
Antonymes makes music at the edge of, and deep inside, and from above North Wales, which you can think of as a very real place, available to be visited at any time in the solid present, and also as a very strange, fantastic, ultimately unreal place, which is all it has ever been, legend, spirit, mist and fluctuating stillness stretching back to a time and place where it was seemed like the beginning of a dream, one that would always become another dream, and another, and so on. It’s worth mentioning that Antonymes is of North Wales: to take an approach to the music understanding the location where it was made up and produced, to approach the music as if it is the beginning, or the end, of some kind of map, that will take you up mountains, across streams, to the sea, where the tide comes in, and the tide goes out, under the waves, through the woods and into the obscure wilderness that stretches between one patch of land and another, between one village and the next. So: Antonymes, of North Wales, recalling the lines of the great North Welsh poet RS Thomas, “to live in Wales is to be conscious at dusk of the spilled blood that went into the making of the wild sky, dyeing the wild rivers in all their courses.’
 
Formed at some point during 2008 by designer, photographer, conceptualist and musician Ian M Hazeldine, as a group that could contain just himself, and others when it seemed appropriate, Antonymes first album was titled ‘Beauty Becomes The Enemy of the Future’. Released initially on David Newlyn’s Cathedral Transmissions label in December 2009, and as a self-published book in spring 2010. A second 2010 release, ‘31: Before The Light Fails’, was released as a digital download and as a special box, an edition of one, containing music and photography, representing Antonymes fear and suspicion of the herd mentality. The piece consisted of two tracks to be played simultaneously in separate rooms. One review described the work as “a daring and inspired exercise in creating a timeless work of art.” Various pieces by Antonymes have appeared on compilations produced by Soundcolours, Dezordr, Cathedral Transmissions and Audio Gourmet.
 
Antonymes music is made up, something coming from nowhere, with no clear sense of what might happen next, and yet a vague sense of what might happen after that. It begins at the piano, where notes, space and intention, and something of the soul, and the mind catching itself combine over time, until a shape appears, which suggest other shapes, and lines, and something else, an anatomy, the lateral spread of a single surface, and a shadow or two. A composition, the result of a mystical sequence of events involving improvisation, imagination, presentation, communication, intuition and manipulation, has been completed. It is the improvisation, certainly, more of Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Alvin Curran and La Monte Young than jazz, the patient, probing occasionally accidental forming of structure, tension and atmosphere around spontaneity and a form of focussed daydreaming, which is a near relation of a form of praying.

Paul Morley, January 2011.

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