CD Reviews by Kevan R.Craft of MIDICraft Email: craftbro@midicraft.demon.co.uk Artist:Asif Ali Title:Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm Type:Audio Compact Disc Album Record Label:Cyclops CD #:CYCL 034 World Distribution:Pinnacle, 99th Floor and Griffin Music Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm Tracks: 1. When the Sun Explodes 2. Interstellar 3. Cyberspace 4. Saddest Girl 5. Love Like This 6. Churchyard 7. Hell or High Water 8. Dream 9. Soul Catcher 10. You'll Never Make It 11. Recipe for Power MIDICraft readers will be familiar with Asif Ali from our previous review of Abbfinoosty's album Future also on the Cyclops label CYCL005.. Now Asif has single-handedly written all the lyrics and music recorded on the Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes the Storm album and used the Amiga music packages OctaMED V6.0 and Music-X V2.0 to create the multi- instrumental backing together with session bass players and a drummer. Asif is a guitarists/vocalist musician and plays his electric, rythym, acoustic and lead solo guitars together with providing the lead and harmony vocals on the album.. Asif originally produced all his song demos for Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm in his small home studio but later ventured into a professional 24-track recording studio and re-produced all the tracks featured on the album using up-to-date technology that a recording studio environment can provide an artist. Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm, as an album title, signifies a change in direction since Asif's first band Abbfinoosty have now disbanded and the work featured on this new album is intended to be a showcase for Asif's solo talents which will eventually be taken on the road and toured with a new band called Storm.. A Scanned image of Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm CD album cover is provided on this issue of the MIDICraft Magazine and if readers have had a glimpse then you would have seen a picture of Asif emerging from a stormy sky background with an open road ahead.. The picture illustrates beautifully the changing direction in the way Asif communicates both his music and himself to the outside world and for an artist this message is important.. Equally important is the musical works and the remainder of this review will examine Asif Ali's Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm CD in the usual manner.. 1. When the Sun Explodes The opening track on the album When the Sun Explodes employs a subtle gradual build-up from an arpeggiated syntheizer piano pad and Asif's picking electric guitar together with his softly spoken-like singing until the track opens up into a a full-blown Rock peice! From now on we now exactly where we are, with a solid rock beat constructed by the bass player and drummer juxtapositioned with Asif's powerchord guitar and soaring rock vocals.. When the Sun Explodes contains a fine chorus and displays some excellent harmony vocals by Asif, and some interesting sound effects, which herald the emergence of Asif's amazing guitar solo, then finally a complete vocal chorus, all of which is really quite stunning.. 2. Interstellar Interstellar is an instrumental providing a platform for Asif to feature his talents as a solo guitarist. Opening with a monologue speech which then lurches Interstellar into the Rock nether regions.. Asif uses a combination of stabbing strings and subtle synthesized instruments together with some stunning drums and bass instruments as backing juxtapositioned with some whacky computerised sound effects montaged over the score. This provides a great platform for Asif to paint a solo guitar narrative, a voice which sweetly sings to the listener from the darkness of space.. Wow! 3. Cyberspace This next track reflects both the emergence of Cyberspace as both a concept of Computer-speak, of communicating with Email on the Internet and of Asif's sense of humour in poking fun at this aspect of modern day non-personal communication.. I like the clever use of sound effect samples within the score, this adds to the black humour inherant in the peice but as the sounds are close to what most computer games use then this also makes for a weird and whacky track at the same time.. The comic overtones in Cyberspace works well particularly with the fun Pop style of music in the composition as a whole.. Its also nice to see someone poking fun at a concept and Cyberspace is a good as any.. 4. Saddest Girl Saddest Girl is an assured track, placed within the Rock ballad genre with excellent overlayed drum patterns, a solid bass line and some fine vocals by Asif where he sings of The Saddest Girl and her lost love.. The musical tapestry provides a brilliantly produced backdrop for Asif's acoustic guitar and vocals.. When we are presented with the chorus this opens with fully orchestrated strings and distorted guitar providing a further springboard for Asif's solo guitar which gently weeps just like the girl in the song's lyrics.. A great song this with fine performances by all the musicians, the vocals are sung with real feeling, overall, a well produced song in the classic tradition.. 5. Love Like This A song's opening can make or break a peice.. With Love Like This Asif has decided to fade in a soloing guitar on a tapestry of sound effects, which act as an intro to Asif's picking acoustic guitar.. We are then presented with a drum beat and bass line which does not follow normal 4/4 timing but instead employs an off-beat effect on the 2nd and 4th beat which works well against both Asif's acoustic guitar and well sung vocals.. The chorus opens to a full-blown orchestrated Rock score with strings and powerchord guitar, the off-beat timing is explored further for the well-executed solo guitar section.. Love Like This follows a traditional written song style employing verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, verse, chorus but does so in such a fresh and interesting way that'll grab your attention with its inherant hook-lines and catchy beat, the chorus is easily memorable too and wouldn't be out of place aired on the radio and even featured in the charts.. Could be a hit this one! 6. Churchyard Again, this track communicates Asif's sense of irony with a deep an meaningful concept.. This time the concept is "Death" or rather what happens to those who are dead and burried only to find that sometimes the living, whilst walking in a churchyard, step over their graves.. Asif clearly displays a talent for this kind of thing.. Churchyard possess an musical arrangment much like the producer George Martin employed in some of The Beatles songs.. Its quite astounding to listen to the orchestrated picture painted by Asif here in this peice, a good drum beat and bass line, the subtle trumpet, the string sections, bells, brass and Asif's guitar all stepping over the musical gravestones within the narrative of the song's lyrics.. Equally there's the additional sound effects which further embellish the weirdness of the peice and overall contribute to a memorable song.. A device used by Asif within his compositions is the build-up from small musical arrangements, a simple beat which slowly intensify and rise up to a climax.. Churchyard is in this tradition where the final part takes a change of pace to develop more fully with a really catchy beat as a background for Asifs amazing solo guitar and amazing it is.. 7. Hell or High Water All popular music derives from the "blues" and Hell or High Water pays homage to this traditional genre.. Here Asif further embellishes this style of music making and in so doing produces his own unique sound variant of this style. Hell of High Water employs a traditional Rock blues back beat but the song is modernised by making great use of a guitar technique known as the "volume swell" which produces the effect of a subtle string section but is in fact produced by the guitarist's finger revolving the volume knob on his electric guitar! This really works within this peice and as Asif sings we also hear an occasional blues solo on his guitar which juxtaposes nicely with the soft bluesy vocals.. This is a great track! 8. Dream Like all traditional stories, Dream unfolds like a Fairy Tale, a narrative with child-like qualitites which is a device used by many storytellers. This track's use of instrumentation contains subtle use of bells, orchestrated strings and deep polyphonic synths together with a solid drum beat, a sound bass line and a picking electric guitar all of which produce the "dreamy" effect inherant in the song's title.. Dream reflects our unconscious, our universal ability as humans to experience dreams - stories in our sleep.. Again, Asif pays homage to a blues Rock style of guitar soloing in this peice, which reminds me very much of the band Wishbone Ash, with beautiful examples of lead guitar work that I've not heard in a long time, and that's very refreshing to hear being played again.. Asif really is a great guitar player in a fine line of British guitarists and his solo work featured in Dream is simply fantastic! Dream is a great track full of atmosphere and delightful surprises just like a dream itself.. 9. Soul Catcher With some lovley apeggiating bells this signals an all-out-attack on your senses which then follows in a rock/ballad tradition. What separates Asif's work from a lot of his predessors is his clever use of arrangements and his production techniques using sampled speech and sound effects and the interesting stereophonic placement of that instrumentation. Here, in Soul Catcher, Asif again takes the role of story-teller, this time its "death" who narrates his story.. Soul Catcher is coming to get you in this song so when your time comes you better watch out! The tapestry of sound employed within Soul Catcher is full of orchestrated strings with a thundering drum beat, thick bass guitar and a solo guitar which simply screams at you as if it were the Soul Catcher himself.. A real powerful thundering track this one which also weaves a kind of spell in the way the music slows down and speeds up in tempo like a heart beat and containing moments of subtle ballad-like arrangements juxtapositioned with moments of headbanging riffs.. 10. You'll Never Make It This track opens with the use of an arpeggiated electric piano which provides a stepped melody for Asif's main blues style vocals.. This is offset with some fantastic harmony vocals in the chorus-line which are perfect and work really well for this peice.. You'll Never Make It opens further in the middle section with some weird and wonderful fairground or funfair-like sampled sounds with Asif's solo guitar, fingers burning on his fretboard. 11. Recipe for Power Recipe for Power is the final track on Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm, and again Asif chooses a story-teller technique using a voice over narrator.. This time its a girl's voice which provides us with a recipe for cooking a weird concoction for a meal that includes boiling a terrepin in a stew - this is the Recipe for Power.. This unusal recipe is narrated over a short wonderkind of a rock track which acts as a musical backdrop to this ironic and child-like Recipe for Power... Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm is a fantasic album and displays a strong sense of maturity in Asif Ali's compositional and arrangement skills. It also demonstrates his talents as a story-teller and singer songwriter with excellent vocal and guitar performances from Asif. The drummer and bass players featured on the album demonstrate a fluidity but are equally capable of forging a tight musical beat structure in musical time and their performances are also very good.. The clever use of synths and sound effects using computers further illustrates this musician's work is communicating to today's audiences but with one foot firmly rooted in established traditions of genre, of European story-telling containing irony and wit but at the same time has pushed his music into a modern arena towards the new millenium.. For those wishing to acquire Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm then it comes highly recommended and as Amiga computers were used in both the compositional and recording stages of this album then you'll be not only acquiring great musical art but a slice of Amiga history as well! Out Of Abbfinoosty Comes The Storm is released Worldwide in July 96 on the Cyclops record label, number CYCL034 and distributed by Pinncale.. For more details contact:- Cyclops Records 33a Tolworth Park Road Tolworth Surrey KT6 7RL. England. UK. Fax: +44 0181 339 0070