Imaginative, accessible, and exciting, Fractal Sextet, the 2022 eponymous debut from the band formed to tour guitarist/composer Stephan Thelen’s Fractal Guitar records, seemed to bring its creator’s vision of blending minimalism, space rock, psychedelia, progressive rock, and old school electronica to its ultimate fruition in a big way. But the music made by Thelan, guitarist Jon Durant, keyboardist Fabio Anile, bassist Colin Edwin, drummer Yogev Gabay, and percussionist Andi Pupato was simply too good to be a mere exclamation point at the end of a paragraph. Thus the players reconvened for the sequel Sky Full of Hope.
It’s tempting to say the Sextet simply picks up where it left off on the self-titled album, but that’s selling short what this group does. Thelen and Durant’s guitars swell and surge, laying intricate riffs, plangent power chord washes, and muscular leads. Anile’s keyboards add lush atmospheres and clever counter melodies. Gabay and Pupato do far more than just provide polyrhythms – the pair weaves around each other’s time signatures, adding grooves that border on the melodic and becoming the heart of the music. Edwin acts as the glue that holds it all together, but not without adding counter (counter) melodies of his own. Not that there wasn’t remarkable cohesion on the first record, but here the musicians really show off the virtues that come from performing and rehearsing together for an extended period.
Of course, none of that would be worth much if not for the compositions provided by Thelen and Anile. “Uneven,” “Flight of the Phoenix,” and the epics “Four Hands” and “Ladder to the Stars” deftly combine minimalist repetition with complex layering, allowing plenty of room for improvisation while remaining accessible to the ear. The album simply sounds great, whether or not we really understand what’s happening in the mix. That’s a delicate tension to pull off, but Fractal Sextet handles it beautifully on Sky Full of Hope.
