AudioStorm - Emotional Recovery (Day Mix)

Balkan Connection opens the summer season by presenting a new full length album from AudioStorm. Hailing from Montenegro, Ognjen Vukovic aka AudioStorm first emerged a decade ago on the strength of early tracks for LuPS Records and Underground City Music. Immediately regarded for his melodic progressive sound, the Podgorica resident would be tipped as a rising force within the genre, earning favour from a broad range of tastemakers, from John Digweed, Hernan Cattaneo and Nick Warren to Marco Carola and Richie Hawtin. Projects on respected imprints such as Sound Avenue, Sudbeat Music and Transensations would follow, and with that AudioStorm became a progressive house staple. Balkan Connection has proved to be a regular landing spot for Ognjen as well, with a contribution to the Serbian imprint’s ’Connections VIII’ collection marking his label debut in 2012; a release which would spawn close to twenty more appearances across the next decade. With 2024 already yielding well-received releases for Oxytocin and Spiral Trax, AudioStorm now returns to Balkan Connection with a much-anticipated album project entitled ’Revelation’. Comprised of ten distinctive and equally compelling creations, it is the charming soundscapes of ’Daydreaming’ which set the tone for the album. Instantly seductive, its laid-back beats, gentle strums and soulful synth phrasing provide the perfect prelude to one of the collection’s showcase pieces ’Emotional Recovery’. Available in both ’Day’ and ’Night’ versions, AudioStorm flexes his free-thinking muscles with evolving, emotional and hypnotizing structures, allowing the listener to relish in the groove, while building anticipation towards an array of cleverly co-axed drum arrangements and emotive synth swagger. Continuing to diversify his portfolio, selection four finds AudioStorm crafting a deep and soulful slice of progressive house that is ’Empathic Clouds’. Its placid atmospheres and timely drum clusters smoothly segue into the melancholic leanings of ’Hope & Happiness’, a seven-minute journey into organic drums, billowed bass lines and otherworldly melodies. AudioStorm’s capacity for storytelling resonates across the album’s mid-point selection ’Life Resonance’. Shot in high-definition and full of detail and idiosyncrasies, it’s a poignant voyage where the Montenegrin artist explores a storyboard of calming synth swells and meandering musical coactions. Meanwhile, on ’Logos’, AudioStorm stretches his creative scope further with a bucolic piece that continues to showcase lighter monochromes and glassy mutations, all while remaining fluid within the confines of the release. The Podgorica resident reaffirms his instinctive ability to captivate a morning dancefloor with ’Night Whisper’, planting multiple explosions of serotonin through fluttery synths, wispy vocal fragments and glowing stabs, remaining confident within the groove for a sweeping aerial finale. The album’s final stretch sees AudioStorm furthering his pursuit of harmonic experimentation with ’Poetry In Motion’. Pitched somewhere comfortably between dreamy reverie and symphonic bliss, it’s quicker tempo and muscular low end proves to be a highpoint in terms of dancefloor dynamics, reaching a tasteful apex of acid-like lines and rumbling bass stabs, before melting down into the fluid tranquility that is the album’s closer ’Primary Fear’. Played out over ten magical minutes, a free-form meditative storyboard showcases AudioStorm’s ability to blend, blur and cross-pollinate genres, as notes ring out in timeless suspension, while panoramic arps sweep their way across a bed of deep beats and rebounding rhythms to round out the album an a thought-provoking note. Text by Release Promo