Vidna Obmana

Serries' career began in 1984 in the sphere of then-popular industrial music, with cassettes such as Monument Of Empty Colours (Decade Collection, 1988), a collaboration with PBK, and Gathering In Frozen Beauty (Decade Collection, 1989), later reissued as Memories Compiled (Relic, 1994). His subsequent albums, Near The Flogging Landscape (VGO, 1989) and Refined On Gentle Clouds (Direction Music, 1989), later collected in Memories Compiled vol.2 (Relic, 1996), primarily testify to his progressive assimilation of minimalist codes.

Serries continued his march of emancipation from the stereotypes of the genre with Revealed By Composed Nature (Decade Collection, 1990) (HicSuntLeones, 1994). These are still hunble electronic vignettes, such as the slow-moving ghostly warped sidereal-psychedelic drones of With Shattering Silence, the serenely bucolic atmosphere of Out From the Garden Reminded, the mystical trance-y stillness of Still Wandering and the delicate wavering fabric of Until the Glowering Space 2. The album is mostly uneventful.

He ultimately attained a kind of sci-fi muzak in the "ambient trilogy" begun with Passage In Beauty (Decade Collection, 1991), three albums on which the electronic arsenal is running at full throttle and albums whose soundscapes are roamed by the ghost of Klaus Schulze. The increase ambitions are evident starting with the size of the compositions. The 14-minute Awaken in Floating Colours - Composition 1 is a mini-symphony of slowly revolving and fading drones. The barely-alive Forever Grown radiates a sense of infinite tenderness. The eight-minute Awaken in Floating Colours - Composition 4 exudes the austere heaviness of a marble statue. The waves of Passage in Beauty evoke the passage of time. The music flows slowly but shuns the majestic overtones of Klaus Schulze for a more down-to-earth humane feeling. Alas, it often sounds indulgent and somewhat "algorithmic" (a calculated repetition of the same patterns).

Shadowing In Sorrow (Decade Collection, 1992) is more of the same. It is often hard to tell one piece from the other. The ten-minute One Charming Delight sets the default format of slow-moving waves of electronic drones. The difference with the eleven-minute Of Great Consistency is that this one is more whispered and slower. Twirling Motion is even slower, bordering on atrophied. The 13-minute Over Angels Grief weaves a slightly more suspenseful atmosphere with its choir-like effects, but it's still stuck in that wave-like format. And the nine-minute Distant Awakening causes a more unnerving sensation due to its overlapping and shifting the waves.

The last chapter of the trilogy, Ending Mirage (ND, 1993), displays more ambition. If Siren sticks to the wave-like format, Mellow at Heart exhibits a more complex movement with interlocking drones that dialogue with and reinforce each other. Ending Mirage (the shortest piece here at not even seven minutes) veers towards impressionistic soundpainting. The 30-minute Luxurius Fragment is a summary of the trilogy, and therefore contains strengths and weaknesses of his method. It rises from an ominous cosmic rumble and ends in a quasi-psychedelic dilated space.

The three albums were later reissued as The Trilogy (Relic, 1995).

Echoing Delight (Extreme, 1993) instead opened his spiritual and tribal phase, in which the monumental electronic frescoes of the trilogy are deformed by the nerve-wracking sounds of percussion. The 17-minute Echoing Delight is the prototype for much of the music to come: sweet, slick drones that slowly change timbre and intensity over a tenuous beat of percussions. The tribal, shamanic element is prominent in the ten-minute Narrow Gloom (Part Two). The percussions are part of the flow (rather than setting the tempo) in Winter Mouvement. Their rhythmic function is evoked, but not quite implemented, in Crystal Travelling. It is brilliant how he evokes the sense of void in The Empty Night, and how the 15-minute Glass Splendour choreographs the stream of whispered hisses, but in general this sounds like an attempt to sell ambient music to the chill-out rooms of the raves.

Spiritual Bonding (Extreme, 1994), recorded in the Arizona desert with the collaboration of new-age gurus such as Steve Roach and Robert Rich, may well mark the baroque zenith of his career. Soaking his languid electronic lines in non-melodic sounds such as didgeridoos, Tibetan bells and tablas, rarely used to set the tempo, Serries achieved a kind of tonal poem that is both personal and universal.
The Feather Cycle is one of Serries' most radical compositions, even if (as the title implies) it is the quintessence of "light". The languid soothing drones that have become characteristic of Vidna Obmana create a liquid dough that is left to dissolve unconstrained but it is soon matched by softly disconnected percussions that recall Nick Mason's work on Pink Floyd's Ummagumma.
Likewise, the subliminal tinkling, angular bass lines and galactic whispers of Spatial Prophecy build up a thick texture, laden with percussive sounds.
The buzz that ebbs and flows out of Spiritual Bonding is masterly manipulated, each wave fed back into the next incoming wave, until it approaches the thickness of a Tibetan mantra, and, at the same time, matched with swampy percussions.
His impressionistic art peaks with the overflow of bells and rattles that embroiders the water games of Nebulous Pathway and displays ever changing profiles in Challenging Boundaries, The Interior Journey, Earth Dangling and especially the flute sonata From The Stepping Stone and the rattling, undulating The Nebulous Pathway, are quiet, still vignettes but full of psychological movement.
If the slow, dissolving phrases of his electronic melodies are still tainted with Klaus Schulze's "kosmische musik", the boldest compositions open new horizongs for his impressionistic art and for the entire genre. The fragrance of the timbres and that way of stretching a sound effect to infinite (a moment to eternity), leisurely, reveal the influence of Steve Roach. The extreme delay of these tracks is ultimately the indifference of a music that is not concerned with evolution but only with "being", in agreement with the zen philosophy of immanence.

Vidna Obmana also recorded Parallel Flaming (Multimood, 1994) and Still Fragments Live (ND, 1994) with Belgium's percussionist Djen Ajakan Shean, Soundtrack Voor Het Acquarium (Zoo Antwerp, 1993) with the Hybryds, an album with Asmus Tietchens (on Syrenia, 1992) and the monumental Well Of Souls (Projekt, 1995) with Steve Roach.

Terrace Of Memories (Projekt, 1992), a collaboration with Sam Rosenthal (initiated by Serries), is mostly devoted to the 17-minute Of Silent Crossings, a slowly revolving and bright sphere of sound that after seven minutes turns into a glacial arctic wind and after twelve in a mournful requiem and finally into a dying lament. A solemn ringing sound acts as the scaffolding for the extremely delicate floating voices of These Ancient Halls. Terrace of Memories is perhaps the closest that his music has come to the tragic overtones of Klaus Schulze's cosmic music (but it could be Rosenthal's gothic brain at work).

Parallel Flaming (Multimood, 1994) is a bit too self-indulgent. The haunting, ghostly whistles of Narrow Gloom (over tabla-like percussions), the vibrating crystal of sound effects of Nocturne, the dilated voices of Triangle Of Dawn, the suspended maracas and minimal motion of Fleeting Space are indeed appealing. However, the tracks take forever to begin (a habit that Serries will never truly remedy) and development is minimal, approaching the stasis of Harold Budd's Pavilion Of Dreams but without his metaphysical depth. And lengthy tracks like Doekoen are plain filler.

The Transcending Quest (almost twenty minutes of inner ecstasy) is released only on the compilation Amplexus (Projekt, 1995).

Dirk Serries managed to repeat Spiritual Bonding's magic moment on another album of languid, ecstatic ambient trances: River Of Appearance (Projekt, 1996).

River Of Appearance (Projekt, 1996) attempts to continue the discourse of his masterpiece Spiritual Bonding, but Serries still struggles to stand on his own (even on Bonding, Roach’s contribution was crucial). The languid and affected tones, marked by the weary pace of the piano, in Angelic Appearance float in that ecstatic territory halfway between ambient and new age. The piano notes in Streamers Of Stillness are like drops falling on a lifeless landscape. Slightly more irregular piano figures disturb the quiet of Solitary Circle, instead creating suspense and tension.
Those in Ephemeral Vision are nothing more than slowly evolving electronic blotches. The technique of cycles and overlaps reaches its nadir of dramatic development in Night-blooming, bordering on hallucinogenic wonder.
In front of nature’s wonders, Serries improvises as an impressionist and attempts a slightly more imposing sound in A Scenic Fall, exploiting to the fullest his art of pauses and slowdowns.
The tender filigree of these romances without melody makes even Harold Budd’s music sound agitated.

On Twilight of Perception (Relic, 1997) Dirk Serries collects a handful of unreleased tracks from the 1990s, with the claim of turning them into a homogeneous work. Granted, the influence of Steve Roach is the only constant, but the pieces are rather trivial and some sound decidedly outdated compared to the Belgian composer’s recent works. Each track represents a step in Serries’ musical formation (that is, an experiment based on a different premise), but few are mature compositions worthy of justifying an album. For the most part, it is a cold exercise in loops and hypnotic sampling.
Still, there are notable exceptions. The angelic and cosmic drones of Sanctuary Of Reply, with unusually metallic timbres, are punctuated by Roach-like ethnic percussion. The gamelan of Primary seems immersed in a maze of distorting mirrors. And the tranquil mantra of Twilight Came rivals much new age music.

Another collaboration with Steve Roach yielded Cavern Of Sirens (Projekt, 1997).

Crossing The Trail (Projekt, 1998) confirms that, if nothing else, the lush tones of Dirk Serries’ electronic music have few rivals in the world. The atmospheric, subdued music of Encountering Terrain, punctuated by dense yet subtle percussion and ghostly electronic wails, is so “organic” and rich with constantly shifting detail that it feels like the documentary of an ecosystem. Then everything fades into long funereal chords, lending a metaphysical sense to the artist’s moral wandering.
The ambitious Trail Dwelling is instead too subservient to the poly-ethnic “deserts” of Steve Roach’s later work (indeed, Roach co-authored the piece). Despite all the chilling dramaturgical depth of Roach’s art, the track has little to add to an already widely explored approach.
Far more interesting is Forest Arrow, in which a long organ drone stretches into swampy rhythms. It’s a landscape at once desolate and magnificent, projecting a sense of infinity, horizon, and the immeasurable, culminating in a thread of female voice yearning toward the supernatural.
The symphonic-overture flair of Mission Ground (sooner or later we may have to grant Richard Strauss the status of new age musician) dissolves into a riot of tiny subterranean noises, and the interstellar journey shrinks into a microscopic gaze at soil particles, ants, and fungi within the ecosystem, with a powerful rhythm that glorifies the premise.
A streak of dissonance disturbs Serries’ placid nomadism when the beatless drones of The Esoteric Source push him into darker territories. But the journey resumes immediately with the fairytale mirage of The Giant Traveller, a kind of impressionist fresco a` la Monet, and concludes with the even more fairytale-like apotheosis of This Splendid Place (co-authored by Jeff Pearce), amid cascades of water, angelic sighs, and immense walls of frequencies.
All in all, it is one of Serries’ finest works.

The 70-minute single composition Landscape in Obscurity (Hypnos, 1999), arranged with flute and saxophone by Capriolo Trifoglio and Diego Borotti, is a re-elaboration of a 1989 cassette (for Seiten Sprung Aufnahmen) that was instead divided in seven parts. Rearranged as a single sprawling composition and augmented by the two acoustic instruments, Landscape in Obscurity became one of Vidna Obmana's most poignant explorations of space, at times spectral and at times celestial, with echoes of Harold Budd and Jon Hassell.

In the meantime Vidna Obmana lent his talent to countless collaborations around the world, notably Echo Passage (Musica Maxima Magnetica, 1999), with Italian composer Alio Die. Variations for Organ, Keyboard and Processors (Multimood, 1999), with keyboardist Willem Tanke; Spirits (Highgate, 2000), with Jan Marmenout on several exotic instruments.

The 138-minute double-disc Motives For Recycling (Soleilmoon, 2000) contains Vidna Obmana's arrangements of two vintage Asmus Tietchens recordings: Linea (1988) and Nachtstuecke (1980).

The collaboration with guitarist Serge Devadder, The Shape of Solitude (Multimood, 1999), is possibly Vidna Obmana's boldest experiment in years. However, Serries' electronics is used only as background for his partner's abstract soundpainting (When A Dead Tree Sings, Perceptual Edge). The pointillism of the guitar and the continuum of the electronics engage in captivating duets. A Stinging Memory Of Shared Skin achieves a stately balance of noise and sound that is unusually harsh for Vidna Obmana's repertory. Leaving This Place Again washes ashore wave after wave of that blend, repeating a trick often (ab)used by Serries.

True Stories (Mirage, 1999) is a collaboration with Jeff Pearce. The twelve tracks are mostly short impressionistic vignettes in the vein of Brian Eno's Before And After Science. Serries' super-slow tempos and sugary tones are mostly dejavu, although at least Wander and One Question manage to replicate past grandeur. The alien noises of the guitar interact in a disturbing manner with Serries' electronic shrouds in Horizon Of Thought and in The Open Darkness, and add a welcome element to a stereotyped form. As usual, it just takes too long for these tracks to materialize, and once it finally materializes it there is almost no development. Most is an album of deferred overtures and of premature endings.

The Space In-Between, one of his most majestic compositions, appears on Ambient Expanse (Mirage, 1999): slowly unfolding organ drones that have the dark and thick quality of gregorian chants.

But his solo The Surreal Sanctuary (Hypnos, 2000) sounds like a distorted echo of the authetic voice of his early albums. Hints to ambient jazz-rock can't redeem a fundamental loss of personality. Several tracks are atmospheric all right (Lamentation, The Fragmented Dome), but Steve Roach's fans have heard them a million times. Serries' status of electronic auteur does not hinge on his imitations of master Steve Roach's style, but on his austere quasi-zen meditations based on the processed sounds of acoustic instruments.

Its second part, The Contemporary Nocturne (Hypnos, 2001), is equally subtle and baroque. Serries' program of manipualting the sound of instruments like fujara and E-bow, electric guitar and flute, is pushed to the extreme.

Subterranean Collective (Projekt, 2001) is an anthology of Echoing Delight, Parallel Flaming and Spiritual Bonding.

During the 1990s the ever prolific Serries has struck gold only three times: Spiritual Bonding and Crossing The Trail. The rest has been a mixed bag of grand ambition and hasty implementation, often derivative (especially towards Steve Roach) and often indulgent to the point of stretching tiny ideas to epic proportions (the classics do the exact opposite). Serries is still an artist in transition and now he has discovered world-music. Tremor (Release, 2001), the first part of a trilogy inspired by Dante's "Inferno", employs a wealth of ethnic instruments. But the soft percussions and the whispering electronics are not a welcome change. Very little happens in most of the eleven tracks. The percussions are a real curse. Only when they stop, do we hear some of Serris' ghostly elegance, as in the floating drones of The Insane Brightness or in the first few minutes of Artificial Repose, that recalls Stephan Micus and Deuter, or Descent, that finally connects with the narrative (one feels the floor sinking and the world disappearing in fumes and flames). Maybe with tracks like Simulate Serries is trying find a bridge to dance music. If so, he really has no idea what Banco De Gaia, Loop Guru, Transglobal Underground have been doing. If, on the other hand, he is trying to paint terrible soundscapes, he really has no idea what the Lightwave have been doing.

Ascension Of Shadows - Meditations For The Millennium (1999), Circles & Artifacts (2000), InnerZone (2002), Spirit Dome (2004) and Somewhere Else (2005) were new collaborations with Steve Roach. Other collaborations included: Variations For Organ, Keyboard And Processors (2000) with Willem Tanke, Echo Passage (2000) with Alio Die, Deep Unknown (2002) with Brannan Lane, Tracers (2003) with David Lee Myers. Vidna Obmana also composed a Soundtrack For The Aquarium (2001).

Spore (Release, 2003) is the second part of Vidna Obmana's Dante-esque trilogy. While using pretty much the same ethnic-electronic-ambient tricks of the past, these pieces draw harrowing visions of the inferno. This might be Vidna Obmana's most original album of the decade, the one that breaks a streak of weak imitations of his own cliches.

Vidna Obmana then embarked in a four-act opera (no vocals, but he still calls it "opera"), each act being a manipulation of sounds produced by a musician: Echoes of Steel (2003), featuring Dreams In Exile, Phrasing the Air, Reflection on Scale and The Bowing Harmony.

Gluttony (2005) and Greed (2006) opened a new series with Klinik 7

Fear Falls Burning is a side-project of Dirk Serries that debuted with the self-released limited-edition First by a Whisper Then by a Storm (2005) that contained eight untitled tracks for droning distorted guitar, recorded live. He Spoke in Dead Tongues (Projekt, 2005) is a more "official" launch of the same concept. It contains nine untitled tracks over two discs, each one entirely realized by spacey guitar drones: psychedelic nebulae of sustained tones (the opening tracks of both discs), om-like symphonies of interlocking drones (the third track), reverbed distorted riffs (the second 13-minute long track), high-frequency incandescent cosmic vibrations (the second track of the second disc), and apocalyptic noisefests (the fourth track). The fifth 33-minute track is an intense concerto for guitar overtones, that is quite busy and intricate by the standards of the quietly static melodies of ambient music. The second disc's monster, its third 34-minute track, is a more intimate endeavour, with bursts of tinkling notes upsetting a lattice of undistinguished drones. Surprisingly, this hyper-indulgent guitar album by an electronic musician turns out to be a lot more lively and interesting than most of the droning music of 2005. Serries certainly "indulges" in the format, but does not "abuse" it. Rarely does a performance last too long, and each track is, de facto, exploring a different facet of this art. By the end of the whole 143-minute proceedings, the feeling is not of exhaustion but of satisfaction; and almost euphoria. To some extent this work is to Serries what Somnium was to Robert Rich: the monumental detour that harks back to a personal beginning and projects into the collective subconscious.

Fear Falls Burning also released the 39-minute piece of I'm One Of Those Monsters Numb With Grace (Equation, 2006 - Tonefloat, 2009) and the live performances of The Rainbow Mirrors A Burning Heart (Auf Abwegen, 2006).

Fear Falls Burning returned with Frenzy of the Absolute (2008), whose droning jams for guitar, keyboards and drums sound like early Pink Floyd stretched to the limit (in particular the 21-minute Frenzy of the Absolute).

Continuum's Volume 1 (Soleilmoon, 2006) and Volume 2 (2007) were collaborations between Dirk Serries and Steven Wilson of Bass Communion.

The four-disc box-set An Opera For Four Fusion Works (2007) collected the four acts released between 2002 and 2007.

Final + Fear Falls Burning (Conspiracy, 2011) was a collaboration between Justin Broadrick and Dirk Serries.

Serries played electric guitar on John Dikeman's Obscure Fluctuations (Trost, 2015), containing two side-long improvisations (From Assent To Refusal and The Heart Strips Bare).

Vidna Obmana was still credited for a deluge of recordings: Eternal Circulation (2012), The Circuit Abstract (2015), Hope And Die (2016), The Passage (2020), Eight Themes (2020), Atmospheres (2020), Fujaratronics (2020), Souls And Sirens (2021), Awaken In Floating Colours (2021), plus countless live recordings.