Stephanie Lamprea and Alistair MacDonald Deliver A Sound Bending Experience With "Ecstatic Visions"
- Byron Booker
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Stephanie Lamprea and Alistair MacDonald recently released an album, and this is a record that expresses a lot of intensity, especially through her performances. Stephanie is a soprano vocalist who is known for shaping sound and creating atmospheres that breed a beautiful aesthetic while still delivering a lot of emotion.
This is a beautiful record that enabled Stephanie to combine classic approaches with new ones by way of bringing together both classic poetry and AI-generated lyrics and narrative, while Alistair brings electronic presence to the table.
This is a bold approach, but it works amazingly throughout this entire release.
Each track gives you something a little different to chew on. The atmospheres are alluring and again can be pretty intense, but memorable, and all take for quite a detailed ride.
Certain tracks feature some amazing poetry in texts from 12th century mystic Hildegard von Bingen to poet Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the way she performs is either with this beautifully robust and operatic intensity, giving off huge vocal presence and utilizing her voice like an instrument itself, or sometimes they're softly spoken words.
Either way, the message gets across, and this record has a very special approach to it.
There are pieces across this release in which Stephanie can really utilize her voice in different ways. While she is giving you these beautiful Melodies and performances on the forefront, she's utilizing her voice in the background as well, a lot of the time to add depth and layers to the soundscape that you hear.
Other times, she's using production to take a track and add a delay effect to it so that you still get that distant underbelly even though everything is sort of in your face.
This was almost fantastical, mystical, engulfing, and really widespread. It's got this thick and theatrical set of approaches and tones that come together.
"The Brightness of Stars" is a piece that gives you this sort of elegant haunt, and as it unfolds, you have swells of sonic presence underneath everything while the vocals are bellowing on top.
This is the kind of track that sort of defines the record to an extent.
Everything is a little different, as I mentioned earlier, but this track is something that is a great example of how she's able to twist sound and make it feel alive so that it wraps itself around you.
A lot of this record gives you sounds that you sort of swim through.
It's all over the place and surrounds you beautifully, so if you listen to it with headphones, you really just get taken in by everything.
I found that to be a really fun experience. Listening to this album with headphones is amazingly beautiful.
It does indeed give you a journey to take, and if you take that Journey, you'll have to snap yourself out of it when it's all over.
This is one of those albums that lets your mind sort of wander. Even though there are beautiful lyrics, poetry, and performances vocally, this is a record that takes shape using other facets of instrumentation and ways to bend those sounds in order to build something a little outside the box.
By doing that, she's creating something boisterous, and you sort of find yourself sinking into it as the record unfolds.
The record is broken up into different segments based on composers and collaborators, including Angelica Negron, Alastair MacDonald, Hildegard von Bingen, Wendy Barkley, Eric Chasalow, and Robert Laidlaw.
Some come through with a much more edgy and Theatrical feel, while others let you drift along in this sort of majestic sense.
No matter what you get, you end up finding yourself attaching to it.
Stephanie Lamprea has really found a way to exude all this creative energy, and this album is an amazing example of what happens when you give someone with this level of creativity the freedom to do what she wants.
So, put on some headphones and soak this album in because it's really a wonderful experience to do so.
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