Secretive synthesist Alexander Melzak puts wind behind trippers’ sails with the wide-eyed wonders and fantasy fanfare of his 2nd side for Light Sounds Dark - think JMJ, Tangerine Dream, Pye Corner Audio, Xvarr, Memotone.

One of scant few original Light Sounds Dark releases, ‘Substrates’ beds down among the label’s bootlegged gems of kosmiche, post-industrial, clandestine ambient and library music to bloom fantastical arrangements of arps and pads between their roots and branches. With fuck-all background info provided, one is encouraged to let the imagination run and freely conjure associations; is this the work of an unsung veteran, or some new age hydroponic botanist in the modern day? Either way it’s definitely one for the dreamers of the dream, a half hour of music rife with pineal sparkle and oneiric texture sure to stir the senses of psychonauts and synth romantics.

Like 2021’s eponymous introduction to Melzak, his follow-up also evinces a symbiosis between the poetic track titles and the music, which similarly balances the florid and classical with a subtle tonge-in-cheek wit and pathos that plays very sweetly on mind. In succinct staging the album unfolds from an iridescent castle-in-the-sky hallucination with Latin title ‘Igne Natura Renovator Integra’ surely recalling Pye Corner Audio at JMJ’s chateau studio, thru the ‘80s fantasy cue of ‘Xanthe Flees the Magisterium’, to what sounds like a Franco-Japanese animation soundtrack piece in ‘Natsuko’s First Mission’ and a breathtaking centrepiece of pitch-bent harmonic colours as soulful sashay on ‘A Coopers Hawk in Slow Dive’.

The 2nd half only wraps itself deeper in dream-textured beauty, transitioning from the lofty monologue and dry-iced elegance of ‘Lustrous, Burnished, Golden Spheres’ to the kosmiche exotica of ‘The Mychorizal Network is Talking to Us’, alive with psychedelic jazz-funk vamps and mushy lushness, to the stately, sustained piano chords and looped vocal of ‘The Last Paradigm’, and a beatific finishing move like 0PN channelling Alice Coltrane in ‘Strings that Connect Dimensions Vibrate, Emitting Sounds that Cascade Like Diamond Waterfalls.’

- Boomkat

Third eye-opening psychedelic fourth-world ambient visions from Alexander Melzak, returning to the infamous Light Sounds Dark label following his 2021 self-titled debut album for the imprint. Substrates is the sonic equivalent of drinking the psychoactive beverage Ayahuasca (DMT) in the jungle, shifting from intense darkness to transcendence and enlightenment. Let Melzak be your shamen.

- Norman Records 

A name as hard to track down as label host Light Sounds Dark’s, enigmatic composer Alexander Melzak has little to no information to his name — could he be a long-gone cult hero who spent his years toiling away at a DAW somewhere under multiple pseudonyms, or a hobbyist who poured his all into a perfectly stellar one-off electronic album? 

Either way, his self-titled debut is a record to rival the kosmische pantheon, its synths shimmering, its arps ascendent, its popping beats a joy to hear. Underlying cosmic darkness rests beneath a great deal of these alien soundscapes. 

- Juno

Rife with glittering arps and diaphanous harmonics, and named with perfectly lofty track titles, Melzak’s eponymous slab plays right into LSD’s black hole of vinyl enigmas. Your guess is as good as ours to Melzak’s provenance, but to our lugs it sounds somewhere between Werkbund and Tangerine Dream. 

- Boomkat

New Light Sounds Dark, sees the label explore original music with abstract, trascendental themes. I don't think Alexander Melzak exists in this dimension, the music he's conjured up here is like a holographic refraction of old C64 soundscapes, the higher communication between planet species and a series of over-exposures to Stranger Things. 

It's exciting and bewildering in equal measure and sure to keep fans of Finders Keepers, Death Waltz, video game soundtracks and B-movie music glues to the end of their stylus until the very last groove. 

- Piccadilly Records 

A name as hard to track down as label host Light Sounds Dark’s, enigmatic composer Alexander Melzak has little to no information to his name — could he be a long-gone cult hero who spent his years toiling away at a DAW somewhere under multiple pseudonyms, or a hobbyist who poured his all into a perfectly stellar one-off electronic album? 

Either way, his self-titled debut is a record to rival the kosmische pantheon, its synths shimmering, its arps ascendent, its popping beats a joy to hear. Underlying cosmic darkness rests beneath a great deal of these alien soundscapes. 

- Bleep