A couple weeks ago when surfing around on the internet, I found myself on djsasha.com, home to my favorite dj, Sasha. The last I came across of sasha was back when his CD fundacion was released about 2 years ago. I figured that he must've been up to something since then.
Well, he's not touring around, but he did release a CD between now and then. That would be the title of this article, Sasha @ Avalon so on and so forth. I wasn't that big a fan of fundacion but Airdrawndagger and Involver are two of my favorite CDs, so i'll give it a chance.
No Luck, actually. This CD is limited to a mere 10,000 copies, and when I searched for it on Amazon, Ebay and Half.com, the cheapest discs were going for $100. I love Sasha, but with his current trend of music, there was no way I was going to put down that amount of cash for a CD.
Thank god for Google. I checked to see where I could find this disc for the cheapest. A couple places had it for $15 and $20. Really?! Oh wait, they're out of stock. I continued to wade through these cheap out of stock copies, when I came across two sites that said they actually had it in stock.. walmart.com and Bull Moose audio.
No way.. they probably just forgot to update their inventories. That didn't stop me though.. at $20 with a possibility of being in stock, why not just order it? The least that could happen would be your order canceled and money returned. So I went for it.. I ordered one copy from Walmart, and another from Bull Moose.
Success! Both of my orders were processed, shipped, and received!
The packaging is pretty badass.. It comes in slip cases that look a lot replicas of vinyl sleeves.
Quite a spectacular little collection for being a CD release of a live set.
Sasha @ Avalon is very much in his fundacion style as of late. Very progressive compared to his previous styles of Involver and pre-Involver. Sasha's motive for music is to build upon many different layers of sound, which he's been systematic putting into his style ever since learning Abelton Live and going completely digital.
I don't get his new style, though. He builds tons of layers, but all the layers eventually blend into each other, with no defintion of melody or sound. It all sounds the exact same to me and very stands out what-so-ever. When I listen to his new style, I completely forget I'm even listening to the music. Later on, I'll check the playlist and realize I've gone through 5 or 6 songs already.. sigh.
Avalon is quite similar to this style but does break away into melody and definition in a few spots. The first disc has a couple tracks that are wonderful.. Unlike all the fundacion tracks, I actually start humming them thinking back to the cd. ^_^
Unfortunately, there aren't enough of these tracks that make me love this cd as a whole. These tracks are quite soothing, but don't bring the painting into a full composition.
Not only that, but he suffers a train wreck in the first track of the second cd. What the hell is up with that? The only reason this cd is so expensive is because of its rarity.. This is definitely one to download, rather than purchase.
Here's my thoughts on each individual track:
