S.E.T.I. - Baikal

Travelling all over the globe, one can find a lot of unique places that can inspire him creating some kind of an art in order to reveal his impression to the world. I am not sure that Andrew Lagowski had ever been to Baikal, but the biggest sweet water lake in the world became the theme of the last album, created by him inside a work frame of the project S.E.T.I.

Baikal is the biggest and deepest sweet water lake in the world, being located very deep in the heart of cold plains of Russia. If you once plan to pay a visit to some kind of a distant gateway in the middle of nowhere, it can be a perfect location for you. Great landscapes, beautiful nature, vast forests, this can be discovered during the journey. A lot of parts of this area are still not explored, hiding mysteries and myths in their virginity. But just before you start spending money on plane tickets, please invest few bucks in the specific cd and dive into the colorful trip, created by mister Lagowski and packed by Power & Steel label (Loki Foundation sub-label) into an amazingly designed and shaped digipack.

Being an expert resident in electronic music scene, Andrew uses all the gained experience to draw a diverse soundscape that keeps constantly transforming from track to track until the end of the whole record. Splashing images are not getting stuck between the compositions, while the author ably operates with the listener's mood presenting different perspectives, trying to play smoothly with emotions to create a fluent drift. The structure of the tracks is not that complex, each of them is crafted around a specific theme, exploiting it to the very depth without being overextended.

The first opening track "Powder Canyon" throws the listener into the very depth of the water, concentrating a floating airy melody over the constant pervasive bulbing. This dreamy composition changes turn with a darker one called "Antimatter 2". A gloomy atmosphere of open space is overloaded with radio disturbances creating a picture of a sonde flying from star to star and transferring information to Earth. A preface inside the next track gives an introduction with a woman speaking in Russian, describing an UFO that she probably saw; while right in time a chilling pulsating sound comes to fill the room with a sense of extraterrestrial presence. The same mood is transferred into the fourth track "Tetrathulaton", where it gets a strong support of different sudden electronic sounds, sullen rolling hum and a light sci-fi melody. I can suggest mister Lagowski to propose himself to be a composer for the next "X-Files" TV show, because the atmosphere of the music incredibly fits into the concept of this movie. The same is also with the next composition, called "Cosmic", where a kid is being investigated for an alien contact, but the melody that accompanies this conversation, becomes almost of meditative origin, though the alien theme is still there. Exploring the mysteries of Baikal, Andrew comes across a "Folding Time", a totally dark ambient composition revealing the interpretation of continuum theory seen through the eyes of an experienced space traveler. And as a cherry on the top of the creme, the last track "Steppe" closes the voyage with a slight touch of sorrowful feeling, but again a strong futuristic sampling of electronic clicks, ticks and scratches put their final stamp on the whole creation.

After the trip of around an hour I am definitely convinced that planet Earth is visited constantly by extraterrestrials; and they leave the signs of their presence inside the mind of some special persons like Andrew Lagowski. What he saw in the image of Baikal Lake, was not only its natural beauty and vast landscapes, but also its enchanting mysticism in combination with futurism and industrialized world. Jul 24 2012