We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Fire Within Glass EP

by Trance To The Moon

supported by
©ough©ool
©ough©ool thumbnail
©ough©ool An underwater dreamscape... breathtaking, enchanting, chill-inducing... this is soulgaze, as in it penetrates straight through & pierces the spirit. This is affectual music, immediate & intense Favorite track: Fire Within Glass.
doctsect
doctsect thumbnail
doctsect Long time fan of TTTS (Ghost Forest is one of my all time favorite albums), ... And this incantation certainly delivers beyond my expectations. All things early darkwave/psy-goth/dreampop/shoegazey/ethereal/romanti-pop... Picture a wonderful gothrock mash-up of earlier TTTS greatness with Lycia, Florence and the Machine, Aria, The Moon Seven Times, & This Ascension... With its partner ep, "Except In Dreams", it's just a great rock set through-&-through. Favorite track: Unexpected Snow ii.
straumli
straumli thumbnail
straumli Just as good as Except in Dreams, but longer. I hope this band sticks around for a while. Favorite track: Antarctic Twilight ii.
flowinglower
flowinglower thumbnail
flowinglower Psych Post-Punk
Portland, OR 🇺🇸

The second part of the band’s debut twin EP release(s), which sees them both compiled onto a CDr for fans to own them both. Perhaps we’ll see a vinyl release in the future. Great stuff from two of Portland’s dark music scene veterans that came together to create some beautiful stuff that showcases the vocalists talents and range outside of their previous band Over.
/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app.
    Purchasable with gift card

      name your price

     

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Full Color factory produced Compact Disc in Jacket Style Packaging (not a CDr). Includes all seven tracks from the "Except In Dreams" & "Fire Within Glass" EPs. This disc is identical to the one shown on the "Except In Dreams" page, so please only buy both if you want two copies! If you purchase the CD from this page, and you would like a free download code for the "Except In Dreams" digital EP, just drop us a note with your order! Total Running Time on the disc is 42:29.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Fire Within Glass EP via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 4 days

      $7 USD or more 

     

1.
2.
3.
4.

about

Review of "Lavendar Skies" 2XEP from Stereo Embers Magazine:

From Echo and Teardrop and other habitués of the second Liverpool explosion to Siouxsie’s kaleidoscopic forays to not a little of shoegaze to the trippier corners of ethereal wave, the line dividing the dreamy expansive milieux more commonly held to be the province of cosmic explorers from the hippie age and those of us more comfortable over here in the darker dominions with our gothic inflections and bat-cave sonar, is a rather ecstatically blurry one, the distinction between the two often – appropriately enough given our purposes here – shadowy at best. One might even contend that the likes of the Sisters, with all that fog and trenchant mysticism, were dipping more than just the toes of their black leather boots into the swirl of psychedelic waters. While none of this is exactly news to anyone paying even passing attention – to the extent there’s been scholarly work regarding post-punk et al over the past couple of decades this is not exactly untrodden ground – it’s certainly been an established article of faith for Ashkelon Sain whose journey through the more darkly bewitched territories of the diaphanous the past twenty-five or so years may well be on its way to becoming legend, a status made just that much more likely with the debut from his latest project Trance to the Moon.

That name, of course, with its bell-ringing familiarity to Sain’s long-running, on-again off-again Trance to the Sun, exudes continuum and is thus a smart move but also a subtly sly one, as this new lunar variety does, in effect, draw the artist’s signature ethereality closer to the earth, a result we feel it’s safe to attribute to the gravitational pull of Moon’s other half, Monet Alarie. Known to most prior to this partnership as the riveting singer in OVER, a forceful focal point in a band abundant in dynamic characters, his role here is both similar and not, both grounding and not.

From the layered, alluring jump on opener “Antarctic Twilight II,” Alarie rises to the challenge of applying his talents to what could fairly be termed a whole other aesthetic as if it’s no challenge at all. Iridescently present, the vocal textured to meet the cascading waves of his bandmate’s flaring atmospherics with supernal ease, the fact that a listener wholly unaware of the singer’s previous – and, we should hasten to say, ongoing – work with OVER would readily believe that Ash and Monet had been doing this together for years is all that really needs to be said. To submit that the pairing of these two talents was an inspired decision is almost too obvious to bother pointing out. But the ‘why’ of that conclusion is nonetheless worth a few words.

Sain’s Trance to the Sun project, through what seems (to him especially, we imagine) a thousand iterations stretching from LA to Portland, has never wanted for sonic intrigue since its very beginning in the early 90s. As long and varying a path as it’s been he’s remained true to the sound’s searing, otherworldly landscapes. Bringing Alarie into the equation, however, introduces a frisson that, while not heretofore missing – Ashkelon’s gift sound-wise has always been the ability to inject shiver-inducing beauty into what could, in another context, be heard as a dark or even doomy backdrop, hence the tension – is significant enough a game changer to merit the name change. This may not be an entirely new panorama but it’s hard to think how it could have possibly been more supercharged with vibrancy or emotive color.

Suitably glassine and shimmering with that airy, bass-anchored weightiness of peak 4AD, “Fire Within Glass,” as per its title (and true to much of the album) exploring matters of transformation and contrast and the richness that can be found therein, presents with an ever-looming, determined grace, Monet with timeless wisdom unleashing gem after lyrical gem (“the heat inside the heart, you are not the love you lack“), “Except in Dreams,” built upon sheet after arpeggiated sheet of icy seductive sound carries such a seductive punch the pair quite wisely chose it to work up into their first video, so signature is it to what they’re about, “Unexpected Snow II,” a love song, an incarnation, an hypnotic beckoning like a hand extended via music, hovers in an intimately holy place somewhere between a prayer and, well, a trance, while closer “Icicles & Fumaroles” (no surprise given that name) occupies that liminal space between the Cocteaus and the barely suppressed exuberance of the Pale Saints at their most intense, a space this band has carved out as theirs alone, no one else sounds like this.

As with anything Ashkelon-related, Lavendar Skies is something of a journey, one not intent on any particular discovery but rather one driven, in a beautifully obsessed way, to simply find what’s out there, following, at heart, an artist-driven itinerary of possibilities. In Monet, emotionally unafraid to go where the song takes him, anchored by a kind of mythical poet’s instincts, Sain has found a foil and fellow traveler and between them they’ve taken that dark psychedelic mesmeria that Ash has been pursuing forever to a place beyond. This is, in modern parlance, next level stuff.

[find Lavendar Skies here; the album is a collation of the band’s first two EPs Fire Within Glass and Except in Dreams, the latter released the same day as the full length. click on the ‘buy compact disc’ link to obtain the physical CD; you’ll be happy you did. And, full disclosure: Lavendar Skies‘ cover art front and back includes photography by the author, work provided gratis and months prior to hearing the finished product]

credits

released August 27, 2021

Monet Alarie: Voice
Ashkelon Sain: Instruments

Cover Design: TTTM
Photos: Dave Cantrell & Ashk

license

all rights reserved

tags

contact / help

Contact Trance To The Moon

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

Trance To The Moon recommends:

If you like Trance To The Moon, you may also like: