Celadon
Bitter Sweet
Maia Arts
Rating; 3.5 out of 5

Link:
Celadon: www.maia-arts.com/music
Preview Music: http://www.maia-arts.com/music/downloads

It’s easy to come up with a self-conceived and self-produced musical venture. What is difficult is to establish something that tingles the ear drums as something unique while maintaining a sense of quality that will take you out of the realm of simple home recording because in reality, not everyone can do it.

That is what Eric Maia (musically known as Celadon) has accomplished with Bitter Sweet. A surprisingly tantalizing experience of mostly instrumentals that blend gothic undertones with orchestrated neo-classical short pieces that could easily be argued that you swore you once saw this album on the Projekt or 4AD catalogue (you have not).

Let’s forget that “Dark Decorum” starts out sounding like Danny Elfman fanfare, the theme song for a series of YouTube videos titled “The Gothic Charm School” (it could happen) floats around between subtle electronics, gorgeous string constructions, and Celadon’s knack for mixing sounds around like smoke moving through air.

“Passageway” could easily get mixed up within Xymox’s later material. With its layered and brooding emotive, the song’s surrealist dream-like quality and Sataray’s chantries-like vocals give it the hypnotic quality it needs.

Celadon does not move far from the meditative electronic style that he originally pursues from the beginning. Even the harsher industrial  — in a Test Dept. sense — get construed by the feeling of coming off of a daze of a week-long spiritual escapade with The Cure’s “If Only We Could Sleep Tonight.”

And as much as I would normally want more, Celadon does a wonderful job at keeping your anticipation balanced with really well-written film work instrumentals and calming electronics. Only Vanessa Skantze’s “The Long Walk Home” goes a little too far with the layering of chant over chant over apocalyptic samples. But that’s okay because “Wysteria” just makes me want to pull out all of my ‘80s Minimal/Darkwave albums I’ve collected throughout the years.

The prozac feeling of Bitter Sweet hinders the progression that this album could make, but the arthouse vibe that emits from the album is charming in its own right.