Artist ︎︎︎Asa Tone & Ariel Kalma
Title︎︎︎ o
Label · Good Morning Tapes
Format · Album
Release · LP / CD / CS
Year · 2025
Format · Album
Release · LP / CD / CS
Year · 2025
Paris-born electronic music pioneer and 1970s GRM alumni Ariel Kalma joins with multinational New York trio Asa Tone (Kaazi, Melati ESP, Tristan Arp) for a series of intergenerational, electro-acoustic studio conversations, exploring elasticity within rhythm and winds… or as one early listener observed “space and time.”
Following a chance encounter at Ariel’s studio in the Australian rainforest during the pandemic, Melati & Kaazi began recording long live takes with Kalma, weaving in bioluminescent synth improvisations from Tristan Arp remotely. Revisited a few years later between the members of Asa Tone’s respective homes in New York & Indonesia, “○” is the document of a significant moment in the lives of all the album’s players; an ode to memory and connection in an era of crisis, illuminated via flickering fragments of steel flute, kantilan, modular synthesizer, xaphoon, tenor sax, EWI, field recordings of the surrounding rainforest, and the human voice.
Produced Kaazi, Tristan Arp, Melati ESP, Ariel Kalma
Written, Recorded, Mixed Kaazi, Tristan Arp, Melati ESP, Ariel Kalma
Art Direction Kaazi, Melati ESP, Biscuit
CD Design / Layout Kaazi & Oshi Kunii
Obi Design Oshi Kunii
"Heavenly new age ambient synthesis and 4th world navigations by two leading lights of their field, flocking to a mutual spirit at the behest of Australia’s eternally reliable Good Morning Tapes. RIYL Asa-Chang & Junray, Jon Hassell, Nueen, Enya, David Toop.
Meeting for the first time on record - although it sounds like they’ve been making music together forever - GRM alum Ariel Kalma brings some half a century of experience accrued deep in synth music’s most esoteric realms, to Leaving Records’ Indo-NYC trio Asa Tone, on a gorgeous album spun from the legendary Electronic Wind Instrument woven with modular synth, xaphoon, sax, and rainforest sounds.
Their debut communion represents an ideal of intergenerational dialogue, with both sides sublimating their energies at the service of the lush whole, where bioluminescent arps sparkle on slow shifting beds of swaying bass amid swirls of lilting woodwind within a self-contained imaginary physics that makes the body feel lighter, and most elegantly plays out on the back of the eyelids.
It’s testament to the natural porousness of approach and timeless vision of both Kalma and his younger spars that they work so well together, cleanly transcending cloying cliches and simply cutting direct to more meaningful planes of existence that need little explanation - you know the feeling when you’re left floating and blissed to the fingertips.
Everything is wrapped up in an opening statement ‘Interlace’, where the elements knit and dematerialise with a sense of deferred suspense that could last forever. The twin winds of tradition and imagination continue to push them to beatific heights in ‘28°35’S 153°22’E’, and pastoral lull on ‘Art of Memory’, while they braid the air like Enya on her noumenal loom with ‘Two Winds’, crafting a raft for supine bodies to drift away into on ‘An Expanse II." - Boomkat Product Review
Written, Recorded, Mixed Kaazi, Tristan Arp, Melati ESP, Ariel Kalma
Art Direction Kaazi, Melati ESP, Biscuit
CD Design / Layout Kaazi & Oshi Kunii
Obi Design Oshi Kunii
"Heavenly new age ambient synthesis and 4th world navigations by two leading lights of their field, flocking to a mutual spirit at the behest of Australia’s eternally reliable Good Morning Tapes. RIYL Asa-Chang & Junray, Jon Hassell, Nueen, Enya, David Toop.
Meeting for the first time on record - although it sounds like they’ve been making music together forever - GRM alum Ariel Kalma brings some half a century of experience accrued deep in synth music’s most esoteric realms, to Leaving Records’ Indo-NYC trio Asa Tone, on a gorgeous album spun from the legendary Electronic Wind Instrument woven with modular synth, xaphoon, sax, and rainforest sounds.
Their debut communion represents an ideal of intergenerational dialogue, with both sides sublimating their energies at the service of the lush whole, where bioluminescent arps sparkle on slow shifting beds of swaying bass amid swirls of lilting woodwind within a self-contained imaginary physics that makes the body feel lighter, and most elegantly plays out on the back of the eyelids.
It’s testament to the natural porousness of approach and timeless vision of both Kalma and his younger spars that they work so well together, cleanly transcending cloying cliches and simply cutting direct to more meaningful planes of existence that need little explanation - you know the feeling when you’re left floating and blissed to the fingertips.
Everything is wrapped up in an opening statement ‘Interlace’, where the elements knit and dematerialise with a sense of deferred suspense that could last forever. The twin winds of tradition and imagination continue to push them to beatific heights in ‘28°35’S 153°22’E’, and pastoral lull on ‘Art of Memory’, while they braid the air like Enya on her noumenal loom with ‘Two Winds’, crafting a raft for supine bodies to drift away into on ‘An Expanse II." - Boomkat Product Review