saphileaum: transpersonal experience

40 minutes of Ambient house alchemy from new age mystic Andro Gogibedashvil aka Saphileaum, gracing Good Morning Tapes with a melt-on-mind batch of anxiety relief that comes especially highly recommended if Art of Noise’s ‘Moments In Love’ still ruins you. Boss of his own label, Theosophy, and with tapes under his belt for Constellation Tatsu, the sublime style of Saphileaum is just one strand of Gogibedashvili’s work, which also takes in drawing and poetry. Factor in a slightly godly look and he appears as some kind of ambient prophet here to salve your stresses on ‘Transpersonal Experience.’ The tracks here trade in a palpable sort of ambient mysticism that treads the finest line between massage parlour soundtrack and genuinely heady sensuality, but mercifully fall in the latter category for us, offering a palms-out and quietly immanent sound with an unmistakeable purpose. He slips us into reverential states with the low lying but widescreen designs of ‘Savar’ and keeps us there via the lolling momentum of ‘Kaf’, the heavy-lidded sunset glyde of ‘Ra’, and utterly sublime tropical ambience in ‘Ta’, with his exquisite drums at best in the lissom shape of ‘Nur’, while ‘Kosmosi’ almost sounds like a form of smudged ambient D&B.