Bliss

Album Review

New age synthesizer player Paul Avgerinos has traveled the world in his catalog of albums and also explored emotional and spiritual realms. As its title indicates, Bliss serves as accompaniment and inspiration to a state of untroubled existence. Avgerinos expresses that state through a series of ambient tracks with appropriate titles — "Contentment," "Fertile Soil of Peace" — using ringing, echoing synthesizer patterns taken at glacial tempos. After several tracks have established the slow, calm tone, "Lightness of Being" presents a somewhat more involved collection of sounds, some of them odd and tentative, with greater musical development. Things pick up noticeably in "Spirit's Breath," with its washes of sound, and "Waters of Life" employs pouring and falling water, making it the album's liveliest track. But the closer, "Stillness," returns to the calm feel of earlier tracks, which means that this is an album to be played with the "repeat" button set, so that its circularity can extend the sense of bliss it invokes for hours on end.