Sonic Curiousity http://www.soniccuriosity.com/

SPACE MIRRORS: The Darker Side of Art (CD on Dead Earnest Records)

This release from 2005 features 54 minutes of eerie space music.

Space Mirrors is: Alisa Coral and Michael Blackman, with special appearances by Arjen Anthony Lucassen and Steve Youles.

Space Mirrors’ brand of space rock mixes glutinous doses of mysticism into the cacophonic displays of hard science, prying back a subconscious trapdoor to peer into the underworld.

Lots of guitars here: grinding guitars, squealing guitars, slide guitars, soothing guitars, ricocheting guitars--all working hard to captivate the audience. Their riffs twirl and bounce on the wind, operating in conjunction with a slithery bevy of synthesizers. Their intent? To mesmerize and seduce. To burrow their trancey melodies into the mind and carve out some cranial space to dwell.

Those melodies are laced with arcane lore. Haunting passages flitter and drift, riding air currents like ephemeral shrouds. The harmonics ripple. The rhythms pulsate. The electronics keep these cerements aloft with their delicate twinkling.

Percussives swim amidst this engaging volume, imparting sultry tempos that often lurk from a submerged vantage, cocooned but unmuffled by the swarming electronic milieu.

To be fair, the electronics are as abundant in this music as the guitars. Shuddering walls of ghostly sound are generated and let loose to wander the stage like animated bundles of vapor.

Periodically, female vocals emerge in the distance, swaddled in the electronic morass, establishing a safety zone among the darkling music.

Behind a mask of space rock, this music explores a purer form of trance tinged with the occult.