White Rainbow

On White Rainbow’s Prism of Eternal Now, you’ll find a label that says "100% Pure Audio Soundscapes.” And while this is likely a mark of irony, it’s a fair descriptor of this meditative and ultimately stunning head-trip. Falling somewhere beneath the ambient umbrella, the record treads on the borders of prog, new age and drug-fuelled hippie folk without falling into the trappings of any of these genres. It lets electronic-based textures, as well as organic ones, wash, flow and stream into one another and, for once, makes a word like transcendental seem appropriate. To then find out Adam Forkner is behind this blissed-out offering is not all that surprising; he explored similar territory in Yume Bitsu, Surface of Eceon and his cruelly underappreciated one-off [[[[VVRSSNN]]]]. But what is surprising is how Forkner has made such huge strides forward in his craft, eliminating all the filler and chiselling his work down into one fully realised point. And while Prism may not be as large in scope as last year’s now out-of-print, five-CD, four-and-a-half-hour-long White Rainbow Box, it’s still one truly impressive audio soundscape.