AstorVoltaires is the solo project of one of the members of Chile’s wonderful Mar De Grises, a band that amazed and improved the lives of many of us from 2000 to 2013, with beautiful dreamy and melancholic doom/post rock records. The sole member of the group is the Chilean, now transplanted to the Czech Republic, Juan Escobar, a former member of Mar De Grises and later in many other groups such as Aphonic Threnody, Lapsus Dei, Arrant Sudade and others. His overflowing musical personality finds its definitive fulfilment in this project, painting beautiful frescoes of peace and restlessness, of dreams and terrible nightmares, with a strong white light that dazzles and warms, making one feel good, as if in a near-death experience. The fourth long-distance work in a career that began in 2009, when Mar De Grises were still active, is perhaps the most complete and melancholic. The imprint of bands such as Anathema or Katatonia is strong, and doom and post-rock are also present, all mixed through the power of neo-classicality. In an era different from our own, this record would have been a painting, perhaps better a marble sculpture to be seen through its refractions of light, in a game of cross-references that takes you far away, the same game that dominates this beautiful work, which kisses and stabs you at the same time, conceived and played with canons that are absolutely outside the normal ones of the market and entertainment. Living poetry by talking about what is above and within us, as high as it is below, and through music so beautiful and poignant that it does not seem real to rejoin the universe out there, and that is already within us. Listening to La Quintaesencia de Júpiter we are enraptured and our hearts open along with our synapses, remaining suspended above a great little work of art, made by a man like us but with boundless musical and narrative talent. The album should be heard as you prefer, but give it time, not listening to tracks jumping from one to the next, but savouring what it gives you, the cosmos, the human body, joy, death or the tender kiss of a ghost. (M.Argo – MetalEyes 16/10/2018)

2018 – Slow Burn Records