Alphaxone - Echoes From Outer Silence

Cryo Chamber: 2016

And now we return to Alphaxone, with his fourth album in half as many years. Man, when some chaps find that stroke of inspiration, they don’t hold back, though obviously we’re not dealing with Merzbow levels of ‘creativity’. Mr. Saleh generally comes in with a clear concept in mind with each album, even if the music within goes incredibly abstract, allowing more creative expression on his part. Thus one can keep knocking ‘em out if you’re not limited by conventional songcraft restrictions. Yes, even dark ambient has its notable markers and canonical concepts – like, I doubt we’ll ever hear an album based on My Little Pony in this scene that wasn’t a deliberate macabre parody.

On Echoes From Outer Silence, Alphaxone turns his muse further towards the unending black speckled with stars, a natural progression considering the trajectory of his album on Cryo Chamber. First it was living in a gray land – bleak perhaps, but still rooted in terra firma of a sort. Altered Dimensions explored sounds and moods of a possible outworld, or mayhaps a world within, parallel to our own; dimensional travel’s confusing that way. Following that, Absence Of Motion found us suspended within the ether between solid ground and space, so it follows that gravity’s relinquished its domain over us just a little more. Damn, am I ever feeling loquacious today.

Actually, the concept behind this album is less about traveling to the cosmic realm, instead hearing the faint murmurs from above. The droning thrum of the cosmos itself, whispers of ancient galactic civilizations, and all that good stuff. Hey, wait… might some of those implied ‘echoes’ from outer silence be actually ‘signals’? Like, obviously Sabled Sun is a post-apocalyptic tale of Earth, and I’m assuming Alphaxone loosely bases his work on the presumption of an earthly starting point, but how cool would it be if Echoes Of Outer Silence was in some way linked to a greater overall narrative within Cryo Chamber’s roster of artists? It’d take the label’s collaborative ideas to a whole extra level, where instead of a pile of ‘em build upon one album’s worth of ideas, they keep adding to a growing arc through a series of albums! Holy cow, that’d be one of the boldest things I’ve ever seen in electronic music, though probably not terribly commercially viable.

Echoes From Outer Silence is the most melodic album I’ve heard from Alphaxone yet, though that’s honestly not saying much considering it’s mostly his drone work for Cryo Chamber I’ve consumed. Still, after a two minute opener of field recordings, second track Resistance offers synth tones ebbing in and out as the cosmic hum dominates the ambience. Elsewhere, Departure presents a melancholic mood within its droning dub tones, and Altered Xone has a mysterious dirge echo off ancient halls. The rest of this album plays as you’d expect of dark space drone, where the sounds are sci-fi, the reverb distant, and the timbre infinite. Nothing like feeling lost in eternal emptiness, amirite?

God Body Disconnect - Dredge Portals

Cryo Chamber: 2016

How? How does Cryo Chamber keep finding these guys? Like, has the dark ambient scene always been this flush with talent, but seldom given much exposure because, y’know, it’s dark ambient? The genre certainly doesn’t have much rep’ outside morbid sorts, nor is it the most inviting environment for the curious passerby. I certainly had little interest in digging beyond the most basic cliff’s notes sampling, and likely would have remained that way had Ultimae not sent me that Krusseldorf album by accident. Which led me to discovering other Simon Heath works. Which led me to Sabled Sun. Which led me to Cryo Chamber. Which keeps leading me to all these neat, creative artists exploring intriguing facets of the human psyche through cinematic music. Do other electronic scenes have this going for them? Like, how about Simpsonwave, eh? Yeah, no.

God Body Disconnect is one Bruce Moallem, Dredge Portals his debut under the alias. His only prior claim to fame was as part of the death metal band Dripping, which has something of a cult following in that scene, their scant CDs commanding a surprising amount of money on the open market. Not that he actively sought fame, and didn’t do much beyond those early days, mostly providing music support for friends and local bands. He kept doing his own stuff too, but little of it was intended for folks beyond his close associates to hear. Then, after hearing what Cryo Chamber was offering, he sent some demos to the label, if anything for feedback on the sounds he was cultivating. They went one further, immediately signing him. And here we are today, some guy now reviewing it after only getting into dark ambient barely a year prior. The Fates make bizarre connections sometimes.

So Dredge Portals. The concept is more concrete than most dark ambient albums go, of a narrator trapped in a coma, explicitly detailing the thoughts, worries, and fears of being in such a state within the opener Rise Of The Dormant Host. From there, Dredge Portals takes you on the sort of suggestive journey this scene – and especially these Cryo Chamber guys – so often excels at. Second track The Reflection Tower is calm, soothing ambient, with sounds of children laughing having me conjuring the narrator remembering an innocent youth, now lost as all his sins come back to haunt him. Descend With Demons is as dark and droning as you’d expect from the title, and Heart Of The Mirror’s Abyss combines the two disparate moods into a remarkable piece of widescreen drone and dub.

Dredge Portals does grow a tad repetitive in tone with its final run of tracks, but by then I’m well consumed by God Body Disconnect’s version of Jacob’s Ladder to care of such quibbles. And hey, Dreaming Of Glaciers does offer a rather gentle mood to end the tale. Save a disquieting bit of final dialog, seemingly rewinding the narrator’s time alive – forever trapped in looping reflection.

Tosca - Dehli9

Studio !K7: 2003

It shouldn’t have taken this long to finally nab myself a Tosca album. For sure I’ve gathered a few tracks over the years, mostly found on compilations showcasing dubby, downtempo tunes with a light jazz inflection. Theirs is a sound that finds a cool middle-ground between ambient dub of Sounds From The Ground, and ethnic-infused lounge-hop of Thievery Corporation. As you’d expect when one-half of the immortal downtempo duo Kruder & Dorfmeister is involved, though it surprises me Richard’s work with Rupert Huber doesn’t get near as much fame as his work with Peter. He’s worked with both for about the same amount of time, Tosca forming in the mid-‘90s. And while the K&D sessions gave Dorfmeister plenty of plaudits, it’s his work alongside Mr. Huber that continues to this day, at least ten albums deep into a two-decade long partnership, not to mention oodles of ‘dub version’ albums. For all intents, this should be the Dorfmeister project that everyone gushes over, but man, that The K&D Sessions™, eh?

Dehli9 is Tosca’s third LP, which I grabbed because it was the first return in an Amazon search. Yeah, can’t claim doing much research into the duo’s ‘Essential Albums’ list, going in with arms out, ears open, and expectations unsullied by other people’s opinions. Which I guess makes me a tad contradictory, if you’re reading this for my opinion before indulging Dehli9 yourself. Really, I just assume it’s searches for confirmation bias that lures folks into reading reviews anymore, though maybe a little exploration outside comfort zones factors into it too – also, quips aplenty!

I actually knew at least one track off here, the jazzy reggae tune Gute Laune, appearing on the Studio !K7 celebratory showcase compilation !K7150. Heck, that song alone helped clue me into getting off my duffer and check out this other Dorfmeister project, despite how long it took me getting around to it. Much of Dehli9 plays to this sound, which tends to be the Tosca style regardless. Tracks like Me & Yoko Ono and Every Day & Every Night go more for a dubby trip-hop vibe, whereas jazzy deep house feature on tunes like Rolf Royce, Spert, La Vendeuse Des Chaussures Des Femmes Part 1, and lead single Wonderful. And we can’t forget some Latin-fusion for good measure (Oscar, Dave Dudley), plus whatever form of jazz-hop is going on in Mango Di Bango, because why not.

Dehli9 is a fine downtempo album, classy as it needs to be, though admittedly keeping an even keel where this music is concerned – you can find this sound on oodles of compilations throughout the ‘00s. Tosca sweetens the deal then, with a second CD of piano pieces, apparently all based on a book Huber wrote called 12 Easy To Play Piano Pieces. These are all very much in the minimalist modern classical mold, though with just enough ambient treatment they’re distinct from much piano music out there. Unless you’re well versed in the works of Harold Budd, anyway.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook - The Dark Side Of The Moog VIII

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1999/2016

This series wasn’t the only instance of Misters Schulze and Kuhlmann collaborating, Namlook also lending a hand on Klaus’ 1996 album Are You Sequenced. Essentially Schulze’s stab at updating his sound, the album was met with plaudits from his long-standing followers, and indifferent snickers from actual techno dorks. So it goes, but for the purpose of showcasing everything he and Pete worked together on, we get a few tracks from that record included as a bonus CD of the second box set in this reissue extravaganza. SQ 1 runs seventeen minutes, doing the trancey space-synth stuff we’ve heard elsewhere on Dark Side Of The Moog, Namlook provides a pulsing Chill Mix for Voices In The Dark, while SQ 4 goes full classic trance – why only the Short Cut though? In any event, this is a perfectly fine bonus disc, and thankfully wasn’t another reissue of a prior album, because I’ve been at these Dark Side Of The Moogs long enough, eh?

And so it’s come to this: my final entry into the epic Klaus-Pete saga. Unless I spring for the third box set, but nay, I’m not in any hurry for that. Or maybe so, if Dark Side Of The Moog VIII is an indicator of things to come. Stretching that “this series are ‘90s TV seasons!” analogy further, Season 8 of most shows often feature a radical twist or ratings stunt to shake up the status quo, and this album comes through once again. For you see, my friends, th’ar be d’n’b in here!

But first, a twenty-five minute opener of psy dub, world beat, and cosmic music. Wait, are we certain Bill Laswell’s no longer around? Other parts of Careful With The AKS, Peter feature short sound-effect doodles (Part II), straight-up psy dub freak-outs (Part IV), throwback modern classical (Part III, Part V, Part VIII), and one Hell of a techno stomper in fifteen-minute long Part VI. Throw in some wailing synth solos (or is that a guitar?) that would have Steve Hillage weak in the knees, and call me flabbergasted we’re still dealing with a two-man party of Schulze and Namlook. And that’s before they start dropping drillin’ Amen Breaks in Part VII! Seriously, jungle is the last thing I’d ever expect these guys taking on – hardcore is a less daft notion, given their proximity to German hard dance – yet here we are, eight album deep in the series, actual freewheelin’ d’n’b on the CD, and sounding not a touch out of place. This, from a Fax+ release? Astounding! Or a ‘shark jumping’ moment if you’re brutal cynical, but I like Part VIII too much to care about scene purity.

And that about wraps up our week-plus long journey to the Dark Side Of The Moog. From here, the two would collaborate less frequently, reconvening every few years for another studio session, plus a couple live shows too. After Namlook’s untimely death though, that was all she wrote for the longest running series in Fax+’ legacy.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Dark Side Of The Moog VII

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1998/2016

This series resembles a ‘90s TV show more than I initially gave it credit for. The first few albums/seasons were the feeling-out process, launching with the premise, figuring out what makes the concept work, and hoping you find enough of an audience before getting canceled. Okay, I doubt Namlook would have pulled the plug on The Dark Side Of The Moog if sales were poor, the chance at collaborating with Klaus Schulze a passion project more than anything. Plus, given Fax +49-69/450464’s strict limitation of pressed copies, how could you determine popularity through sales anyway? By how fast they sell out? What they go for on the second-hand market? Incessant pleas from fans for more copies, just this one time, oh please!?

Back to the TV analogy. While The Dark Side Of The Moog had tweaked and refined some aspects of its concept for the first few seasons/albums, it wasn’t until its fourth that things coalesced into something truly distinct in of itself. The Schulze/Namlook tandem was finally working as a mutual work, with both participants accentuating each other’s strengths while helping hide their weaknesses. The loose, freeform approach to each album prior settled into a concrete core if not in vision, then at least in structure. And who can forget that brilliant bit of stunt-casting with legendary bassist Bill Laswell, adding a fresh dynamic to the established interplay between the two main stars.

As with most successful TV shows, we’re in the Golden Years of the series now, but almost uniformly it’s around Season 7 where we find the first flecks of froth in the inevitable backwash of creative success. The Dark Side Of The Moog VII has these hallmarks too. For sure it maintains what’s worked before with the same degree of polish and finesse, but a few cracks of staleness unfortunately crop up too. For one, at an even fifty minutes long, this is the shortest album in this series, period. Laswell’s input is almost completely moot by this point too. He still contributes to two of the six tracks, but beyond some dubby effects lurking in the mix of Part I and space drone in Part III, I don’t hear much of his distinct sonic ticks. I know these tracks are Pink Floyd puns, but Obscured By Klaus seems entirely apt in this outing.

Part I and II mix into one another, moving from Berlin-School ambient to electro. The album then radically changes tone with Part III, nineteen minutes of spacey ambient that moves into another round of spacey electro in Part IV. I’d like this more if one of the synth solos wasn’t among the lamest I’ve ever heard (even from trance camps!). The final two parts, at nearly twelve minutes total, mostly shows off Schulze’s modern classical chops, again fine but nothing we haven’t heard before - which I can say for this album in general too. It’s little surprise only one piece was tapped from here for that Evolution retrospective of the series.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Dark Side Of The Moog VI

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1997/2016

The Dark Side Of The Moog has seen many ideas for its cover art, details of which I’ve included in the hover text in the image for each review (you… did know you could hover text all this time, right?). Let’s delve into this one a little further though. No, it’s not because I need to burn self-imposed word count after six albums of Schulze-n-Namlook sessions. This is important!

So, this is the CD cover art that comes within MIG’s reissue box sets. They’re all essentially identical, but for the fact Earth inches further down the image with each album. For instance, it started beside Klaus’ name with the first CD, is at about the mid-point here in the middle-albums, and will lay near the bottom by the final CD. A cute enough premise, but it wrecks all sorts of logic if you understand orbital mechanics.

Look at the illuminated sides of the moon and Earth – north to south, right? Thus, from this particular perspective, the solar orbital ecliptic is a horizontal line in the middle of the picture. As Luna’s circling dance with us also remains on the plane of the ecliptic, that would mean Earth should, in fact, be moving right to left in each subsequent CD, not north to south. How did the art design screw this up so bad? Like, they got the orbital mechanics correct with the box set’s main art, so they can’t be ignorant of such a fundamental property of space physics. Did they imagine Earth to have undergone a cataclysmic change of its axial rotation, flipping it by ninety degrees like Uranus? That would allow for a ‘north-south’ motion of Earth from the moon’s perspective with its side illuminated as such, but then where’s the debris field of such an event? Where’s the debris field?

Sorry, but if RedLetterMedia has taught me anything, it’s that there’s humor in nitpicking micro-minutia. Fun times!

Anyhow, Dark Side Of The Moog VI brings us The Final DAT, giving me pause whether Schulze and Namlook were thinking this might finally end their frequent collaborations. Nah, I doubt it, the two still finding new ways of tinkering with their formula even at this late stage. Well, ‘late’ being relative, the project only three years removed from its initial conception. Plenty o’ fire left to burn, especially with these two incessant music makers involved (Laswell too).

The Final DAT has a mish-mash of individual tracks, very long compositions, and pieces extending through different Parts. Part V is the lengthiest at over twenty-four minutes, and is all kinds of space-synthy awesome while at it. Part II and III goes from grand cosmic beat (like, world beat, only… cosmic) into brisk space-synth of its own – oh, and neither III or V feature standard kicks either. Crafty. Part IV with Laswell does have soft, minimalist techno going on, but adds a de-e-e-ep sub-bass line to the trip. Wait, is this proto-microfunk? No, wait, there’s electric guitar jamming too. Never mind.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Dark Side Of The Moog V

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1996/2016

One box set down, one to go. Sorry, fans of Dark Side Of The Moog IX-XI, but I ain’t springing for the third volume of this reissue series just yet. Getting the first two was pricey enough, and if television rules apply to music, then anything past Season 8 is guaranteed Zombie Years. Concept worn dry, sprinkled with gimmicks in futile hopes of spicing up the stagnation, not to mention a Sweeps Baiting surprise wedding for one of the more popular ‘ships on the series. Mind, I’m almost certain Bill Laswell never hooked up with Schulze or Namlook in such a manner, not even in some weird subset of synth fanfiction. (please don’t tell me Rule 34 has produced such a thing…)

Actually, Laswell’s contributions to Dark Side Of The Moog were on the wane by this point, offering his input on just two tracks for session number V (aka: Psychedelic Brunch). We’re also further from the ‘single song’ concept the project started out with, this album the trackiest of the lot yet. Whereas prior CDs had a sense of continuous themes explored throughout, segueing into each part as it played out, this one has distinct tracks from one another, no ideas carried over or re-explored elsewhere in the album. Perhaps the closest we get is Part III and Part VIII, though almost entirely due to them using similar, stuttery downbeat rhythms between them. At first I thought these were the two cuts Laswell had a hand in, as he is the most rhythmically minded of the three, but nay, only Part III is where he crops up, plus droning dark ambient piece Part VII, sounding rather similar to his work as Divination at that. Also, but damn, Parts III and VIII has a lot in common with the sort of psy-chill I’ve heard coming from the Ultimae and Altar ranks over the years – talk about your ‘ahead of its time’ narratives, but then that’s long been the talking point regarding Berlin School synth work anyway.

If there is any sort of unifying theme to Psychedelic Brunch, it’s in letting the individual aspects of the players involved strut their stuff. Schulze’s use of traditional synths in a classical sense (re: Berlin-School) prominently feature in Part II, IV and VI. Meanwhile, Part V, the centerpiece of this album at over sixteen minutes of length, plays to Namlook’s meditative approach to ‘90s ambient music, the sort of stuff likely heard in chill-rooms rather than art-houses. And heck, even the inventor of the Moog, Robert Moog, shows up, in an introductory bit of dialog. He also shills his email for some reason, though considering this was 1996, maybe they thought doing so added to the futurism of the project? Wait, wasn’t ‘retro-futurism’ the whole point in the first place, bridging the generation gap while taking the ‘70s and ‘90s into an undiscovered country? Where can Dark Side Of The Moog even go now? Man, all this projected crisis of faith over an email.

ACE TRACKS: September 2016

While putting together this playlist, I was struck dumb with a peculiar feeling of time displacement. Like, I know it’s only been a month since I wrapped up the ‘T’s with Twoism and Twentythree, but it feels like such a lifetime ago. I seldom get that sense when doing monthly musical recaps, the albums from the first days of a month almost as fresh on my mind as those from the last. It doesn’t seem like I’ve made a ton of progress through my massive alphabetical backlog either, only halfway through this Dark Side Of The Moog trek. Yet I take a tally, and I’ve gone through nineteen albums already. Man, I’m gonna’ be at this backlog until the end of the year, aren’t I? Poor ‘U’s, waiting forever for their time to shine (shut-up, ‘V’s, no one cares about you; ‘W’ be cool tho’).

I’m trying to figure out what’s caused this discrepancy within my chronometer, how it feels as though extra time was added to this month of September. That whole ‘changing of the seasons’ thing may have something to do with it, weather going from balmy summer to crisp autumn creating a sense of temporal extension. Didn’t have that prior years though. There was a week-long ‘stay-cation’ in the middle of the month for yours truly, with more free time to do non-routine things that might have fabricated a feeling of accomplishing more than I actually did. Can’t really say consuming the near-entirty of the Post Atomic Horror Podcast backlog in my downtime is actually an accomplishment though (still, much entertainment was had!). It’s that darn American election, isn’t it, dragging on and on and on, taking the world along with it. Such a clickbaity, time-sink of an election, folks. Here, have some ACE TRACKS from the past month to ignore it for a while.


Full Track List here.


MISSING ALBUMS:
Various - Artificial Afterlife Compilation
Bill Laswell - Axiom Ambient: Lost In Translation
Neil Young - Blue Note Café

Percentage Of Hip-Hop: 2%
Percentage Of Rock: 2% (would be more if those Neil Young songs weren’t mostly blues – it’s different!)
Most “WTF?” Track: Anything from Jlin, depending on how prepared you are for this forward-thinking music of the FUUUTTUURREE!

Wee, reverse alphabetical order! Been a while since I did one of those. Music’s a fairly standard mix of the sort you’ve likely come to expect being covered from this blog now. Lots of ambient, dark ambient, dub, techno, and chill, with splashes of house, trance, synth-pop, hip-hop, rock, and whatever it is you want to call Jlin’s work. It’s a solid assortment of tunes, though spoilers, next month’s will feature some surprising doozies.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Evolution Of The Dark Side Of The Moog

Ambient World/MIG: 2002/2016

I wasn’t considering detailing the bonus discs of these Dark Side Of The Moog box sets. True, I’ve a commitment to reviewing Every.Single. CD. of my music collection, but I’ve fudged things here and there. Most double-disc entries receive a lone write-up from yours truly, and even 3CD sets are sometimes reduced to a singular offering of my self-imposed word count (sorry, Trade: Past-Present-Future; not-sorry, This Is… Techno). What harm is there in quickly glossing over redundant features, of which I’m almost certain these bonus discs are. What does Vol. 1 of this bundle include anyhow?

The Evolution Of The Dark Side Of The Moog, eh. Huh, it’s got completely different cover art from all the stock ones used for the other CDs. It also apparently contains tracks from each of the first eight editions of the series (or ‘excerpts’ in the case of Wish You Were There and A Saucerful Of Ambience, since those two weren’t indexed as typical albums). I guess this would serve as a handy hour-long summation of Namlook’s work with Schulze, picking out the highlights, or at least the best musical representation of the project. Why stop at Dark Side Of The Moog VIII though, when the series made it all the way to XI? There’s more than meets the eye with this CD, and I must find out. I must!

*clickity-clickty clack; searching Lord Discogs ain’t wack*

Well I’ll be darned. The Evolution Of The Dark Side Of The Moog was indeed a separate release, put out on Fax +49-69/450464 reissue sublabel Ambient World. And as it came out in 2002, there was only eight volumes of Dark Side Of The Moog available anyway. This… also means that I now must review this CD as its own entity, but out of alphabetical order since it’s contained within this first box set. My OCD is sending conflicting demands.

Charmingly, it opens with a bit of dialog from Robert Moog himself, offering an introduction to The Dark Side Of The Moog, plus his email address or some reason. This was used in the fifth album of the series, and has now thusly ruined the surprise for the next review. Thanks, MIG!

Only a three minute synthy piece from Wish You Were There makes the cut for this Dark Side Of The Moog mega-showcase, but A Saucerful Of Secrets gets a whopping fifteen minutes plucked from its lengthy runtime. Fortunately, it’s the best fifteen minutes of that session, starting with energetic techno before heading into another synth solo from Schulze. Part III and Part IV of Phantom Heart Brother shows up, and if you can’t remember which those were, um… it’s the electro piece, and the synth heavy techno piece. Three Pipers At The Gates Of Dawn features Part VII and VIII, a short drone portion followed by another techno work with Laswell Bass (Ace Track, remember?). And as for the remaining tracks, I’ll tackle them when I come to them properly. Y’know, spoilers and all.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Dark Side Of The Moog IV

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1996/2016

Mr. Kuhlmann worked with dozens of musicians in his time, but only a few did he continuously pair up with. Naturally Klaus Schulze is one such individual, otherwise we wouldn’t be diving into a twelve volume series called The Dark Side Of The Moog right now. Move D. (David Moufang) was another one, though the bulk of their collaborations took place in the new millennium. Then there’s Bill Laswell, who’s worked with so many musicians (just, so many…), a couple sessions with The Namlookian One was a no-brainer. I’ve already talked about their Psychonavigation work, and between that and their Outland side-project, they racked up eleven albums total, most produced before the year 2000. Seems natural then, that Mr. Laswell would get himself in on those Dark Side Of The Moog sessions while hanging out at Namlook’s studio. Why absolutely these modern Berlin-School works could use some heavy dub bass action. It’s, like, old-school meets new-school, with a dash of middle-school thrown in! Yeah, I know, Laswell’s more known for his ‘90s work than ‘80s material (including the project Material), but that darn tagline got stuck in my head, and damned if I don’t get it out!

Having ol’ Bill onboard makes for a radically different album in the Dark Side Of The Moog canon, with less adherence to Schulze’s approach to music craft. In fact, this album is remarkably uptempo considering the players involved – even Namlook’s take on trance was slowly on the wane by ’96. For sure Three Pipers At The Gates of Dawn (Part I) has the hallmarks of a typical Dark Side Of The Moog outing, with minimalist sounds and effects floating about. Yet there’s also a sense of urgency too, building synth strings and intermittent sci-fi noises escalating the piece’s tension.

By the time the brisk pace of Part II drops, it all feels worth the wait, a right hum-dinger of a… trance track? No, it’s not really that. For starters, it’s nearly twenty-two minutes long, and most trance just don’t do that (unless you’re Oliver Lieb). Secondly, while it has the mini-arp bassline and high-bpm, the actual kick is quite soft, leading to a rather tame rhythm section in service of the synth and dub action going on throughout. And it seems each contributor to this piece has their own moment to shine, whether it’s Namlook doing his sci-fi effects thing, Schulze doing his synth solo thing (a charming, whistling number), or Laswell adding extra *oomph* to the bottom end without ever overshadowing the others.

Part II really is the main talking point on here, but here’s a few additional notes. Most of the remaining tracks (nine in total) are brief, droney, experimental pieces, few breaching three minutes in length. Part V does a little techno for its short running time, and hey, Laswell’s bass! Part VIII explores the idea more, over eight minutes worth. It’s cool, but nothing we haven’t heard from the players involved before. Man, that Part II tho’… hoo!