From risk-taking imagination to formulaic templates: an irreversible trend in Hollywood film scores?

 

Jerry Goldsmith conducting

There was a time, like the somewhat distant 1950s, when a film intended for mainstream market dared to wildly experiment with its soundtrack. 

One enduring example is The Forbidden Planet (1956), which featured a truly ground-breaking  experimental soundtrack. Nothing like that was heard before in a Hollywood film. Further examples from subsequent years abound, and perhaps the secret is that the directors in those cases had more control over the end product than in the case of current (wannabe or actual) blockbusters...

Omen was not exactly an elitist art house venture either, but the late Jerry Goldsmith was given the freedom to experiment... and he did. Who could forget the sheer genius of using a repetitive, whispering but utterly menacing choral motif as the sound of the demonic dogs' breath? 

There was a time when John Carpenter was tinkering in rather superb way with his synths, we had William Friedkin resorting to progressive rock visionary Mike Oldfield or used the sonic imaginings of trailblazing electronic music giant Tangerine Dream. 

When Terminator shook the movie theatres with its footsteps, it did that with a musical backdrop provided by Brad Fiedel. He relied on the very early incarnations of digital sampling technology to produce many of the movie's signature sounds, too. He even had the audacity of using an aggressively pitch-shifted cello sample for one otherworldly sound that now everyone recognises as the ominous cue for the appearance of the Terminator.

Michael Mann, firmly rooted in mainstream and popular genres, had a look at his music collection - and then used everything from Kitaro to Michael Brook to Moby in the soundtracks of his famous thrillers. Think of the music, and its effectiveness, as used in Manhunter and Heat, to name just two key examples...

Oliver Stone and Ridley Scott brought in Kitaro and Vangelis, David Lynch pitched some ideas about a certain TV series to Angelo Badalamenti... 

And then... Hollywood, and not just, had a severe bout of selective amnesia. 

They, and soon everybody who was attempting to replicate successful-looking movie recipes, forgot what film soundtracks could be like - and stuck to some admittedly charming and successful solutions. These recipes that were then endlessly repeated by endless series of imitators, even big names succumbing to the charm of the found and tested formulae.

To say that it is a sound "expected by audiences" is like saying, with similar disregard for the causality chain, that Alex DeLarge expected to be a good lad in Clockwork Orange. If not brainwashed, we have been auditory cortex-washed by the omnipresent 'norm' that certain compositional and instrumental arrangement recipes have become.

It may rattle many cages if one drops Hans Zimmer's name here. Not that he is the problem, but what happened to his highly successful compositional formulae remains a perfect example.

Many may not recall how experimental and cross-genres composer he used to be. Maybe it is worth revisiting his soundtracks for Rain Man, Thelma & Louise, or Crimson Tide... or even some parts of Gladiator. None of them were intended to be art house movies with experimental scores... They were squarely aimed at the mainstream market, but Zimmer had vastly experimented with exotic ranges of sounds and arrangements. 

Apart from a few moments of absolute genius, e.g. S.T.A.Y from the soundtrack of Interstellar (a track that had flavours of Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi, seasoned by a pinch of Max Richter), there is a Zimmer recipe that has become a template for what we hear in movies. Using the orchestra for rock-like riffs, staccato minimalist patterns, punctuated with electronic and/or acoustic percussion layers... it is hard to find action scenes in blockbusters that do not follow the template.

Hollywood, a hollow shadow of its former adventurous and risk-taking self, has essentially stopped and even reversed what one could call the evolution of soundtrack composing and orchestration. 

Sure, we have Clint Mansell, or Cliff Martinez, or the spellbinding maestro Thomas Newman as examples of stunning geniuses when it comes to thinking in sounds.

We have had Villeneuve taking risks in Arrival, using Johann Johannsson and Max Richter in memorable and mesmerising manner.

We may have had M83 scoring Oblivion, Daft Punk scoring the sequel to Tron, but then their not quite Earth-shattering success was perhaps a re-enforcement for the mainstream studios' perception of "let's just stick to minimalist ostinato orchestral riffs" à la Zimmer & Co.

It is as if huge majority of studios and soundtrack composers are copying the very same formulaic recipe, and then we have even Zimmer self-plagiarising in astonishing manner. Care to hear the shocking "similarities", to put it mildly, between Time from Inception and Journey To The Line from the superb The Thin Red Line?... Some even made videos directly comparing the two. 

The fear of moving outside the small world of admittedly captivating but used-to-death compositional recipes we hear in almost every single successful action or thriller movie of recent years has basically killed mainstream movie soundtracks.

"Serious" soundtrack composing with completely cross-genre and cross-technology approach can be phenomenal, and yield mainstream success. 

Should we mention at this point Blade Runner by Vangelis?

The significance and the highly representative details of the original's soundtrack are a matter of music, and specifically electronic music, history. 

However, the sequel was a superb example of what happens even in such films. 

The firing of the late and sublime Johannsson, the hiring of Zimmer to make an incredibly self-conscious, trying to avoid imitation and still ending up terribly derivative, soundtrack is a splendid example of the forces that decide what we hear in our movies nowadays.

Is it because directors are not really at the helm of the monster productions any more? Is it because vast budget blockbusters are made by committees, often pre-calculating (or so they hope) the audience reactions with (what they think is) minimising of risks?

James Cameron had quite a say in what and how he used in eminently blockbuster movies not so long ago. Famously, he decided to use for the Titanic drawing scene one of James Horner's early piano-based sketches of what became the main theme, a piece that Horner had not intended for actual use in the film. He himself was quite surprised that Cameron decided to use the piano piece in the very form that it was sent to him - and, as we know, it fitted astonishingly well for the scene in question.

If directors and those with, dare one say, artistic say in the making of mainstream movies do not regain that level of control, we shall see a further flattening of already desperately bland soundtrack compositions. Latter can sound fantastically enthralling and they shake the cinemas' walls with great effect, but they can be lethally bland musically.

Sure, bits of Transformers or Marvel movies are stirring and effective, but that does not negate the fact that they are incredibly formulaic when it comes to compositional and creative thinking. 

So Zimmer and his copyists by now are not really a cause or manifestation of a disease, they are the symptoms of a disease... and the direction in which the disease is evolving, in seemingly unstoppable manner, is clear.

Multiple sonic pleasures: Multiplicitas by Magic Bullet

 

Multiplicitas, the extra special double debut album by Magic Bullet, another artistic incarnation of the underground and independent music guru that is Mick Magic. This blog, too had the pleasure over the recent years of savouring and writing about Mick's long-standing travails in the underground music scene - and this is yet another epic creative venture unleashed on the rather surreal world of 2020...

The double album consists of Solidarietas and Curiositas - and they take us from something firmly rooted in experimental sound galaxies to head-bobbing high-octane progressive rock.

Solidarietas was reportedly born out of a creative wave that initially provided a shorter work for a musique concrète compilation. This hour-long experimental composition is demanding attention - which is quite different from what often-seen misconceptions about the genre state. 

It may well start with elements of ambient noise, radio broadcast fragments in Russian language, natural sounds - but, like all imaginative musique concrete, it is not background ambiental music. It is clearly a product of the digital era, this is not Varèse experimenting with rudimentary tapes... Thus, there is much more precise control in sculpting sounds - and considerably more processing possibilities that propel the listener into another world. 

In a many ways, the mindset that is required for an introspective work like Klaus Schulze's Sebastian im Traum is needed here. The overall effect, not the individual elements matter here as we are taken on a sonic journey. The processed 'raw materials' certainly seem to fuse time and space, evoking imagery from the Soviet era, moving through the cogs of some immense Pink Floydian machinery, then floating off to some alien corners of outer space...

The second disc, Curiositas brings a mighty energy injection with the opening track, M.M.A.T.T. 33 - which is a mash-up of earlier Magic Moments At Twilight Time works, mainly from Creavolution (latter having been reviewed on this blog, too). It feels remarkably fluid for a mash-up, and with a driving rhythm that will certainly recharge battery cells after the previous meditative journey.

The A.F.C. Song continues on an energetic note, and rightly so - as it is a tribute, firmly rooted in space punk, to A.F.C Wimbledon. Dance, Freak gives us an ambiental, mysterious-sounding repose with sampled and processed voices, with a return to high-octane and tight riffs that have serious head-bobbing potential. 

Stille Nacht follows as a re-interpretation of the traditional song, which will definitely surprise many. It starts as an ambiental journey, with a sonic imagery evoking winter scenes, with a dreamy, but playful, piano arriving on the scene... until a firm and eminently electronic section cranks up the energy levels. 

As Christmas, its natural setting, and the whole sacred/secular juxtaposition of things around that time of the year got a thorough(ly) prog-rock treatment, why not look at (and dive into) Easter, too?

Thankfully, the following two tracks do just that - the first of those, Jesus Is Dead (Let's Eat Chocolate!) has a charming family connection, too with the mastermind behind this double album - as it features a very young family member (undoubtedly also a great fan of, uhm, secular aspects of Easter, namely the aforementioned chocolate).

We keep the energising and forward-driving, even propelling, rhythms and riffs, with a tempo that stays with us for the Jesus Has Risen (Let's Mow The Lawn) track, too - where we have more electronics joining the arrangements, with (no pun intended, or maybe a little bit...) spirited modulations of  synthesised sounds.

The bonus track, which ends our sonic journey from experimental to high-octane prog rock realms, is Live In Session (On Tudno FM) - an edit in three parts of a recent radio appearance, with special live versions of tracks from Curiositas.

Thus, definitely not shortage in creativity and inspiration, which means that hopefully other concept albums from Magic Bullet await us in the future. In the current rather unusual, often well-and-truly mad, times it is certainly a very welcome escape from everyday surrealism.

Prog rock at a cosmic scale: Rick Wakeman's The Red Planet

The so far rather surreal 2020 can bring some epic delights, too - and it seems one of them is the new studio album by the keyboard legend Rick Wakeman and his band,  The English Rock Ensemble.

One never knows what might be released by this veritable institution of progressive rock, as Wakeman has amply demonstrated his ability to travel effortlessly across many genres and styles. Over the thankfully many years of his compositional and keyboard wizardry, we have heard everything from vast choral-symphonic epics to energetic instrumental rock to solo piano gems to tranquil, even ethereal,  soundscapes.

This album's music is quintessential Wakeman, of the kind we haven't heard for some years. Every  phrasing, every ornamenting of the lead lines on the keyboard, the gear changes, the epic, even majestic, passages, the juxtaposition of very different musical layers that all work together splendidly in true Yes manner... 

Whether one arrives at this album with novice ears & eyes, without any exposure to Rick Wakeman's monumental discography, or as an avid prog-rock fan with shelves bending under the weight of his and other prog luminaries' albums... either way The Red Planet will highly probably prove to be a thoroughly satisfying listening experience.

Wakeman's landmark concept albums always had majestic overtures, the very first chords and musical phrases inevitably grabbing the listeners' attention - as the great Italian Baroque composers have done. Unlike some of the latter, Wakeman always knew how to continue in captivating ways... 

The opening track, Ascraeus Mons is an overture that is worthy successor of those fondly remembered Wakeman albums' grand openings. Imposing organ chords are quickly followed by splendidly fluid synth lead motif, with the usual (and expected) virtuosity set the scene for the album - but we are treated to a through-and-through rock guitar solo, too. 

Tharsis Tholus gives the listener a chance to have an initial repose, before we have sudden changes of gear, direction, and even tonality in true Yes fashion... and then fast-paced, typically ornamented organ and Moog melodies come in. Wakeman really, truly, rocks off with his inimitable Moog solo. The freshness of the music is remarkable, so is the almost superhuman keyboard skill that almost absurdly hasn't been affected by the passing of many decades... 

Arsia Mons keeps the energy levels high, opening with an abrasive and spirited riff, punctuated by epic drumming... before it suddenly gives way to an atmospheric passage of quasi-poetic beauty. The phased synth background with the gentle layers of notes on top of it make it quite dreamy, before the energy  return with intertwined drums, keyboards, guitars flying off again. Another quiet passage brings the guitar to the forefront, with organs just gently underpinning it until the phased synth pads arrive again for a dreamy finale... making the whole track float off into some kind of cosmic tranquility...

Olympus Mons shifts gear again, we jump from introspective dreamy sound waves to fast fingers running up and down on the organ keyboard, chasing the fiery drums, with guitars speedily circling around the central musical motifs... This then transitions to a majestic organ-heavy chorus of an almost anthem-like feel, followed by a super-tight good and proper rock affair, with riffs and a synth lead that are utterly impossible not to do some head-bobbing to. 

The North Plain moves us into the realm of mysterious ambiental layers of sounds, tiny musical motifs hovering in the sonci textures conjured by Wakeman... until it transitions into another eminently head-bobbing passage... Catchy and tight riffs provide the structure for an organ solo that just brings the ceiling down even before that, oh yes, that Moog sound returns for a fiery solo. As in previous tracks, we rapidly switch gears - we are suddenly back in an eerie and almost spooky soundworld, until the Hammond organ again throws us into a world of motion and light.

Pavonis Mons is again a highly animated and animating track, with a precise riff preparing the scene for those Mellotron strings and Moog leads that enchant any Wakeman fan. The melodic content is, once again, extremely catchy - with improvised ornamentations that are instanty recognisable in style. The instrumental arrangements show that no sonic colouring is out of bounds, as in the middle of a high-flying rock discourse we have piano, too having a heck of a dialogue with the Moog. 

South Pole fades in with a wash of sounds, giving way to yet another captivating melody that glides effortlessly above layers of synth sounds and laid-back drumming. It has just the right tempo and choice of softer synth sounds to make it a dreamy, yet purposefully flowing track. The synths give way to a solo piano passage of superb and delicate beauty, which feels like a calm sonic oasis... before the track builds up, lifting us again with the synth rich pads and catchy lead motifs.

Valles Marineris opens with a menacing military march-like rhythmic pattern, as the god of war deserves in a way...  The guitar and percussion take centre stage initially, with synths providing a circular melodic thread that carries the whole structure forward. This track, too manages to build up effortlessly into anthem-like passages, and one could be completel forgiven for finding oneself whistling along, too... After trumpets, fiery Moog, and thundering drums, the rich arrangements allow the piano to shine again, before the catchy melody returns with a flute-like synth lead. The structural thinking is again evident, as the track is as perfect ending to the album as perfect grand opening the first track was.

It is a highly cohesive and structurally admirably constructed album, with a consistent quality throughout. The eight tracks combine into what some of the best of concept albums are known for: an adventurous musical journey through many moods and mental images, during which the tracks feel inseparable from each other. 

In a world of sound snippets and random playlist shuffling, The Red Planet definitely stands apart and works best as a whole - as an album. 

Juno To Jupiter: a vast musical journey by Vangelis

 

The concept album, inspired by NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter, and recorded in collaboration with the superlative soprano Angela Gheorghiu, has had a turbulent adventure even before its official release.

Vangelis fans could acknowledge with a contented smile that the entire album is absolutely unmistakably the work of the Greek master, with entirely new tracks.

Not only that each track has, as it will become apparent in the review below, signature sounds and technical aspects we encountered on some of the most fondly remembered Vangelis releases of previous decades, but... each track perfectly expresses its respective title, and they perfectly blend together into a truly epic musical adventure. 

It is considered "old-fashioned" nowadays in electronic music, which is understood by many to be just EDM, to have a proper and programmatic approach to composition. Well, Vangelis, once again, approaches the album's concepts with meticulously developed and executed compositional intent. 

Each track is a musical description and an enthralling artistic interpretation of that track's theme - and it all fits into a phenomenal and truly epic journey through time and space. It takes us from references to ancient mythology to the vast spectacles staged by the giant of our Solar System.

As this is a Vangelis album, this is not a cold, cerebral space ambient work. 

Even if it had been, and even if it had resorted to classic space-rock means, one could still point out that, well, most of those musical means were actually invented and made instantly recognisable by Vangelis...

However, this is a passionate, epic, genuinely enchanting record, with seemingly superhuman imagination and compositional skills taking us from the most serene and ethereal harmonies to the most thundering unleashings of cosmic forces one can possibly imagine. 

Until its September release, hopefully the below track-by-track review can be a useful taster for what awaits the avid fans and those who may not have heard previously Vangelis's works.

1. Atlas's Push
The references to ancient mythology and space exploration run alongside each other throughout the entire album. The opening track refers to the Atlas V rocket that lifted the Juno space probe beyond our atmosphere, named after the Titan who had to hold, for all eternity, the celestial heavens.

The menacing electronic pulsations underpin mission control commentary... and when latter gives way to an evocation of outer space, we are suddenly propelled into the swells of characteristic sounds we may have heard last time on Antarctica and the Alexander soundtracks.

This is not a depiction of Juno leaving our atmosphere via some abstract and clichéd space ambient sound painting - this is the emotion, the exaltation that the humans who created and launched this probe must have felt.

Once again, Vangelis is the Great Romantic of human endeavour and exploration - depicting the human emotion rather than the abstract cerebral aspects of the central theme.

2. Inside Our Perspectives
This is a youthful, jazzy track of a laid-back, but distinctly head-bobbing, character. Vintage synth leads fly above pulsating waves of electronic percussion and bass arpeggios, with exquisite care taken in sound design, too.

The track induces in the listener a sense of dynamism, expectation, and excitement that must have surrounded the entire mission.

3. Out In Space

Again, we could have been treated to some space ambient collage of sounds, but Vangelis choses to depict in sounds a sense of awe. We have here the unmistakable brass and string sections that enchanted us on  the Alexander soundtrack and during The Thread ballet score.

Great swells of mighty chords are punctuated by crystalline piano arpeggios, this is again about our human emotions as we follow the mission from our tiny blue dot, as Carl Sagan described our cosmic home. 

The Earthly majestic sounds are underscored by a quite contrasting and eminently electronic sound pattern that, as a simple but effective artistic solution, manages to describe the alien strangeness of outer space.

4. Juno's Quiet Determination

It would not be a Vangelis record if it had not seized on the ancient mythological possibilities offered by the central theme.

Bouncy, staccato patterns of electronic pulsations are providing a shifting structure above which lush chords, ethereal vocal sounds, crystalline harp and glockenspiel notes start to hover.

And then there is an ethnic woodwind motif, which manages to sound ancient and futuristic, giving a mysterious and timeless feel to the music. As Ridley Scott said about the soundtrack to 1492 Conquest Of Paradise, Vangelis is uniquely able to sound ancient and contemporary at the same time...

5. Jupiter's Intuition

Orchestral swells and ominous timpani evoke mental imagery of Jupiter, the almighty deity and the giant of our Solar System. 

The thundering crescendo that elevates us to emotional heights is suddenly restrained, with a brief ethereal repose… before tidal waves of sounds return. 

Walls of our listening room swiftly vanish, we are in the realm of vast stretches of space and time.

6. Juno's Power

We are again elevated, propelled up and up on the emotional scale, with swells of grand string and brass chords supported by thundering staccato patterns from the electronic orchestra... 

If we recall Heaven & Hell or parts of the colossal Mythodea, well, we can again realise that only Vangelis can depict the Cosmic in this way with his unmistakable tuned timpani punctuating those lush textures.

Huge forces are unleashed here, but they never cross into the realm of uncomfortable. There is a majestic, but seductively simple, melody that appears above the vast sonic landscape, making this another hugely uplifting track.

7. Space’s Mystery Road

A playful, and once again a surprisingly jazzy track, with a laid-back electronic percussion pattern that provides solid structure for the playful piano improvisations, latter being sometimes punctuated by Vangelis’s instantly recognisable  timpani. 

One has to make a reference to Albedo 0.39, as Vangelis treats us to cosmic jazz-rock motifs during our cosmic journey, as he had done several decades ago on that classic space-rock album.

8. In The Magic Of Cosmos

Would we be hearing some predictable new age-ish electronic texture to evoke what the title of this track expresses? Perhaps yes, if this were not a Vangelis album...

Instead, we have an achingly beautiful, uplifting and expansive, but astonishingly economical motif of just three notes… brought to life by an epic orchestral arrangement. Just three notes build the poignant melodic motif that makes us feel as if we are expanding beyond our physical body’s confines.

Again, this is the Cosmos translating all its mysteries into a few sounds that we, infinitesimal beings, can just about grasp with our limited senses.

9. Juno's Tender Call

The track marks the first appearance of the sublime Angela Gheorghiu on this album. Her celestial vocals, which are intertwined with the vast orchestral tides, feel effortlessly improvised. 

One cannot imagine a more splendid evocation of Juno, the ancient goddess, than this blend of almost otherworldly vocals and exquisite synthesizer textures.

10. Juno's Echoes

We move from the ancient to more abstract and mysterious realms, this being an eminently electronic meditation. Melodic fragments appear and reverberate in those signature Vangelis sonic spaces, amongst gentle bell-like sounds. 

This is another peaceful track where the melodic motifs feel as if they were playfully improvised, but they are eminently restrained and highly effective in their beautiful simplicity.

11. Juno’s Ethereal Breeze

Angelic vocal textures conjure up the imagery suggested by the track’s title. Ethereal might become an over-used word in describing passages of this album, but this track's title is perfectly fitting.

Swirls and crystalline twinklings of sounds embellish the choral notes, preparing us for another very visual track that follows in our cosmic journey.

12. Jupiter’s Veil Of Clouds

Another immersive track, perfectly prepared by the previous composition - we glide into the mysterious world of Jupiter's clouds, we shift from mythological references to the scientific mission of exploring a fascinating alien world.

Vangelis is stunningly able to depict musically both the fragile translucent cloud formations and unimaginable atmospheric forces unleashed by the planet. The musical solution is elegant and effective, once again.

Synthesizer arpeggios, with very short, almost spiky sounds, are contrasted by floating, lingering notes on a piano - the Earthly meets the otherworldly. The pulsations get stronger, the timpani sounds appear with ominous rumbling and thundering… There are vast Cosmic forces at work here, not just ethereal and mysterious beauty.

13. Hera / Juno Queen of the Gods

After we have been shaken and stirred by Jupiter's unimaginably vast and powerful atmospheric currents, after we managed to marvel at its strange beauty thanks to Vangelis’s’ sonic wizardry, we land in an ocean of splendid tranquility.

The gentle notes from woodwind and harp-like synthesizer sounds melt, this really is the right word, they melt into gentle string textures - which, in turn, give way to soaring vocals by Angela Gheorghiu. 

Hera, and her Roman mythology equivalent Juno, are evoked here with reverence.

14. Zeus Almighty

The longest track on the album is dedicated to, whom else, the almighty Zeus of course, Jupiter’s equivalent in the mythology of Vangelis’s homeland. It is as if we are taking a journey in the mind of the Greek supreme deity, before we move back into Roman mythology with the following track. 

This is also a journey into the tumultous unleashing of forces that the planet shows us in unprecedented footage acquired by the Juno probe.

For those who have seen the documentary Vangelis And The Journey To Ithaka, perhaps one could describe the track as something like that literally breathtaking improvisation we can see in the film. The track feels improvised, with a firm structure but many gear changes, and an almost superhuman ease in going from translucent, fragile, ethereal sounds to thundering orchestral unleashings of immense forces.

For the technically minded, one side-note would be that we can hear those phenomenal and highly characteristic string patches we have marvelled at during the period marked by the albums Mask, Soil Festivities, and Antarctica.

One can almost see Vangelis unleashing these forces with impossibly effortless gestures on the stacks of keyboards. We hear Zeus's capricious temper, his human escapades, his dark and luminous moods... A very human deity, with an inner world as turbulent as the mighty planet's.

15. Jupiter Rex

The track is a natural continuation of the previous one, with thundering timpani and vast, ominous choirs… 

It feels almost as if we have moved seamlessly from  the ancient Greek to the Roman evocations of the supreme deity.

At the same time, both tracks conjure images of the colossal forces the largest planet in our Solar System is capable of demonstrating on Juno's unprecedented images.

16. Juno’s Accomplishments

Angela Gheorghiu’s ethereal vocals provide us with a respite after the mighty sonic tides we heard in the previous two tracks. 

Harp arpeggios and gentle piano notes are effortlessly gliding over waves and swells of characteristic string chords, whilst the vocal gives this track, too an almost mystical feel.

17. Apo 22

From timeless chapters of ancient mythology, from boundless expanses of the Cosmos, we suddenly return to Earth for a moment. 

We hear NASA mission control again, marking the joyous moment of the Juno probe successfully executing the crucial Apo-22 manoeuvre, which avoided the long flight through Jupiter's shadow that would have depleted the solar powered probe's batteries. 

The voice recording is infused with shimmering synthesizer sounds, giving the brief intermission a suitable spacey feel.

18. In Serenitatem

Only at the end of China, during the mesmerising finale entitled The Summit, and in the last movement of Mask could once one hear such ethereal sounds...

The fragile, translucent sonic elements are conjured up via the inimitable Vangelis alchemy of choral and string synthesizer patches, we are hearing evocations of cosmic waves, a sense of vastness and tranquility, made all the more atmospheric by electronic chimes as if they were emanating from some crystals from the depths of Jupiter.

The track fades into total silence and proves that once again, Vangelis has an unsurpassable ability to capture a sense of cosmic vastness via the most economic and restrained palette of sounds.

If one was mesmerised by the sublime finale of China, then the finale of this album will definitely have the same effect on that listener.

Vangelis has, again, taken us on a quintessentially human journey through near-impossible to comprehend distances of space, to colossal scenes effortlessly created by Jupiter... Once again, it is an ode to human endeavour, human ingenuity.

As the Rosetta album demonstrated, and Juno To Jupiter makes it all the more evident, Vangelis can surprise, mesmerise, and stun us with a musical and sonic inventiveness that knows no fatigue even in 2020... after so many decades of relentless and astonishing creativity.

Fifty Years Of Unique Audentity: Klaus Schulze

Borrowing the pun of one of his landmark double albums, it seems fitting on the last day of June to look at the vast body of work of one of the most individual electronic music visionaries of our times, someone with a very unique and instantly audible identity... pardon, audentity...

In June 1970, the first album appearance of Klaus Schulze occurred. At that point he was a member of what has become a veritable institution in the electronic music sphere: the band Tangerine Dream, founded by the late Edgar Froese.

Electronic Meditation was the first and last Tangerine Dream album that featured Schulze - as he promptly moved on to establish his, by now legendary, solo career. 

Audiences may not have suspected at that time that the drummer, who joined Tangerine Dream after a brief and unreleased musical contribution in the rock band Psy Free, would become a unique and vastly (seldom successfully) imitated electronic music luminary.

His early solo albums, Irrlicht and the double LP Cyborg, presented us a daringly and unashamedly experimental musician who could conjur up entire strange worlds in as long as possible continuous compositions. Back then, the physical medium only allowed twenty-odd minutes of continuous sonic poetry... but the later Klaus Schulze of the CD era could mesmerise us with seventy-plus minutes long monumental electronic structures...

Well before "trance" entered the terminology of music, and well before it has become a label for a particular sub-genre of electronic music, Klaus Schulze was creating an unmistakeably personal and truly unique kind of electronic trance.

One could pick from his vast discography the hypnotic Timewind and Mirage from the heroic and analogue 1970s, the astounding Audentity or En=Trance from the confident and digital 1980s, the spellbinding Das Wagner Desaster or In Blue of the mature and limitless 1990s... or the epic, but intimate, Rheingold or Silhouettes of the recent years...

The one central trait of all Schulze albums has been a rare, much sought-after, and countless times attempted to be imitated feeling that this music simply comes into being, without someone playing electronic or other instruments... and it exists, flows, occupies all available space without any human intervention.

It is impossible to listen to Klaus Schulze as background electronic music. Whilst he was and is recognised as a giant of the sequencer-oriented Berlin School of electronica, Schulze's music demands close attention.

Even if, on the surface, repetitive structures or sequenced elements are present, they are full of continuously changing, morphing, flowing myriad details. The intricacies of his live or studio performances are dazzling, if one closely listens to the ever-changing sonic Universe he achieves to create in our room. 

Over the fifty years, Schulze has never stopped innovating and changing. Sure, some artistic decisions could be seen as questionable or one could point out major U-turns in his ars poetica.

The key aspect one must not forget is that artists like Schulze have experimented with sometimes wild departures in highly unexpected directions, instead of standing still. We may wish that we had been treated to countless repetitions of Timewind and we may go misty-eyed when thinking nostalgically of the musical world of Dune or X. 

However, as in the case of Tangerine Dream, one has to realise that instead of self-repetition, such artists were daring enough to constantly seek out new directions, experiment with even never before touched technologies, and move with the times - or, actually, define those times. 

He has treated us to superhuman-looking and -sounding live improvisations, impossible to dissect and mind-blowingly complex whirls and galaxies of sequencer patterns, vast floating sonic ambiences before ambient music became a term, trance-inducing grooves before trance music became a term, imaginative and daring use of sampling, collaborations with legendary musicians as far from electronica as one could possibly imagine... Who would have thought the legendary  Lisa Gerrard's vocal improvisations would perfectly and astonishingly blend in with Schulze's vast sequenced structures in a live setting, too?... 

It might be impossible for an avid electronic music, or even Klaus Schulze, fan to like all his live and studio albums... However, the one constant we can easily hear on his albums, irrespective of the fundamentally different sound worlds he has experimented with over half of a century, is that Schulze sound...

What is it exactly? The long flowing compositions? The mind-bendingly complex and constantly shifting sequencer work? The superhuman improvisations running through the fluid soundscapes? The seamless combination of ancient sonorities, even ethnic vocals, ocean-deep sonic textures, and fiery improvised leads?

Even after fifty years of album releases, one cannot be sure... but as soon as previously unknown to me Schulze album or composition popped up on radio or elsewhere, I used to jump: that had to be Schulze!.. and it was.

If there was one person who would, not too strong of a word, hate pigeonholing his vastly varied musical output, it would be Schulze himself. 

As the grand master put it in a recent interview, "Remember ‘fusion’ once? Or ‘jazz rock’? And in 1990 it was for some parts of electronic music ‘acid’, ‘acid jazz’, ‘house’, ‘deep house’, ‘Detroit techno’, ‘rare groove’, ‘New York garage’, ‘industrial’, ‘Latin hip hop’ et cetera. All these fashionable coming-ups of words are not the terms and definitions I think or care much about. I am neither a swish sociologist nor a smart journalist but just a dull little musician who’s doing and enjoying his very own doings, and I call it ‘music’.”

Thus... thank you for fifty years of live and studio albums of music, Maestro... and may we be spoiled by further sonic creations in the future...

The great escapes... of the music making process

From the first rhythms of hitting two stones together in a cave to a music workstation packed in our luggage, music and its creative process staged four great escapes from their confines. 

The hugely disruptive inventions, which caused those great escapes, are now taken for granted - because their results changed our world so significantly. 

Arguably, the first musical scales and their reproducible definitions, which were used to tune musical instruments, essentially allowed the creation and playing of music to travel from one person to another. Pythagoras certainly has a big claim in that department, and his scale has shaped even metaphysical musings on music and its significance for several millennia.

However, learning and reproducing music has remained a superbly tedious process. It could take even up to ten years to become an ecclesiastical singer in the early Middle Ages, as the only rudimentary musical notation available to the monks merely captured a vague outline of the musical piece. 

The so-called neumatic notation was merely indicating, for example, whether the melodic line was going up or down. Singers learned compositions by listening to, and repeating, others.

The first truly great escape of music came from the colossal idea of a Benedictine monk in the early 11th century. 

Guido of Arezzo has had the phenomenal idea of working out a musical notation that allowed musicians to reproduce a piece of music on sight. He also invented a method of teaching, and even to the Pope's great surprise, a score could be instantly performed by boys who have never seen or heard the musical piece before.

This was absolutely unheard of until Guido's invention of modern staff notation. A score could be sent to singers somewhere else, and they could instantly reproduce the chant...

More than a thousand years later we take it for granted that someone can produce a score, send it or publish it to others, and it is a truly ordinary concept for us that anybody who understands the notation is able sing or play the composition on sight, anywhere else in the world.

It is somewhat amusing to think that many centuries after Guido, some tried to lock music up behind certain walls. 

The most famous example is that of Allegri's Miserere, which was considered so divine that its score was not allowed to 'escape' the walls of the Vatican... Only three authorised persons were given transcriptions of this indeed sublime work.

Imagine the pleasure that Guido would have felt, if he had seen a young musical genius called Mozart listening to the piece during a visit to Rome, and then transcribing it from memory... 

Thus, Allegri's masterpiece had literally escaped the mighty walls of the Vatican.

Still, music remained an ephemeral wonder. One had to be physically present at a performance, and once having listened to it, one could only rely on one's memory to evoke the sounds and emotions of the work. 

One may not have had the means to attend performances, and one's access to certain types of music performed in certain settings may have been limited or completely made impossible for one's entire life.

Thomas Edison's humble wax cylinder has changed everything in 1877. 

True, it was shockingly rudimentary by today's standards, but suddenly, any musical performance could be recorded and reproduced elsewhere, any number of times, by practically anybody.

For us, it seems absolutely banal that ephemeral musical performances could be preserved for posterity - or that one could repeatedly listen to performances by musicians one could not meet, from venues one could not access.

This initial, and later immensely developed, recording technology allowed radio and all other broadcasts, too in the years and centuries that followed.

It may not seem like an invention that had direct and vast impact on music creation, but... composers were no longer creating pieces of music that were laying around on pages of scores that were only usable by trained musicians, and audible only by people who could attend performances by such musicians. 

Composers could create musical scores that were recorded once in a recording studio, and then their creations could reach millions of people scattered around the globe, who could listen any number of times to their beloved musical favourites. 

This even had impact on the format and content of what they composed, e.g. in popular genres some songs 'had' to fit onto certain mediums in terms of duration.

Dave Smith's & Chet Wood's invention of MIDI in 1981 brought us the next great escape of the music creation process.

Imagine if Bach had had a MIDI keyboard and the means to record MIDI information... His ephemeral (and reportedly stunning) improvisations could have been captured for posterity, and reproduced instantly as if he had been sitting at the keyboard. 

MIDI, or the musical instrument digital interface, became the perhaps most stable standard that could carry not the sound, but information of the actual musical events in a musical performance. 

It encoded, in a form universally understood by any MIDI-capable instrument and software, the musical notes, the way in which they were played expressively by the musicians, and heaps of extra information of that very performance. 

Musical compositions created on digital instruments and computers could be instantly transformed into a musical score, passed to entire orchestras as a finished piece of music noted down in traditional form. Guido would have loved to see this...

We may take it for granted, but for the first time in mankind's history, musical notes and their performance details could be instantly captured, reproduced and developed further, sent to someone else to collaborate on quasi-instantly... The actual musical composition process suddenly escaped any physical confines of locality and time. 

One could return to a complex composition weeks later and continue where one had left off... One could instantly recall elements of a work, could change it, elaborate on it... 

It also brought another type of escape: a break from human limitations. 

Imaginative and revolutionary composers could now develop pieces of music that were literally impossible to perform by humans, no matter how technically gifted they may have been as players. In terms of complexity and tempo, MIDI allowed the creation and reproduction of compositions that could never have been born without it and the instruments that could turn MIDI information into sounds. 

Only a few years later, the next great escape of music creation & production occurred.

The 1980s have brought us the affordable and portable music workstations that eventually made the entire music creation process, from composition to mixing to mastering, fully portable...

Ensoniq and Korg were at the forefront of this revolution, if we don't count the Synclavier in the late 1970s or the Fairlight CMI, which were pricey inventions in their initial incarnations. These were for quite some time confined to high-end studios or were in the hands of established successful musicians who could afford them. Also, in terms of features, they were not yet the end-to-end music production tools that later workstations at a fraction of price have become.

However, workstations like Ensoniq ESQ-1, Korg M1, and their vastly powerful successors have changed everything. With their immense sonic range, on-board effects, MIDI recording and editing, even multi-track digital recording and mastering, allowed one to pack the studio into a bag... and take it anywhere. 

Later the arrival of purely software workstations running on personal computers, especially laptops, truly made the music studio portable. 

Not just the composition, but the entire music production process has become something that one could pack into a bag, travel with, unpack during travel or on arrival, pour the fruits of one's labour into other equipment... or make even a CD master copy without using any other tool. 

Where would the next great escape come from? What could it be?

Perhaps we lose our dependence on the instruments and studio production tools packed into a mighty software or hardware workstation? Maybe the next great escape comes from outside music technology, in the form of wearable and implanted tech... 

We might see the 'escape' of the very early stages of the musical creation process, i.e. turning thoughts directly into compositions that can be downloaded to anything or anyone else, without the reliance of an external musical instrument to first play it on...

We could think up perhaps musical pieces, sounds, soundscapes, directly translate them in our heads into audible and reproducible works, which then can be transferred to others... without having a laptop or a bulky synth workstation carried around with us. 

Whatever it may be as a next disrupting and world-changing step, for now, we can just reminisce on where we ended up since a humble monk in an Italian monastery wanted to write down music that could be instantly understood and reproduced by others...

Farewell to a sound perfectionist - On Florian Schneider's passing

It is difficult to write more than the acres of eulogies that have been written on the passing of the co-founder of Kraftwerk, Florian Schneider, at the age of 73.

Thus, one could try a completely different and personal angle instead.

When I first heard Kraftwerk's track Spacelab, I was in my early teens in Ceausescu's communist dictatorship. As there were only a few hours of mostly propaganda-filled TV each day, Saturday evenings were special... There was a 30-minutes-long show called Teleenciclopedia, which was popularising science - and one of its slots was about astronomy and space exploration.

They used a lot of electronic music, which was considered ideologically "safe" and clean, also, the music of the future. For the aesthetic promoted by the propaganda machinery, electronic music was a progressive genre, and usually was significantly less censored than rock, pop, or even classical music was. How ironic it was to have eminently humanist musical creations embraced by the dehumanising totalitarian propaganda, by ideologists who completely misunderstood what the music was about...

So that TV show put me in contact with instrumental electronic music, as they used sections of synthesizers-based tracks... Kraftwerk was one of the electronic legends that made me perk up.

Although their aesthetic was carefully crafted to point to Earth, humans, and, among other things, the dehumanising potential of technology, it was wonderful escapism for me. They could point out what technology could do to human society, but they were not dystopian - quite the opposite really, and often even with subtle humour and irony.

Food rationing, the dangers of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong place, the repeated power cuts, endless propaganda in every media, freezing cold class rooms due to heroic savings on heating and electricity were an indescribable opposite to the electronic music sometimes heard on radio and TV.

For me, Kraftwerk was not space music, like Tangerine Dream and some of the 1970s albums by Vangelis were. It was about us, society, and Earth - but it shared a certain sense of melancholy that I liked in the aforementioned electronic legends' music.

It was about another world, whilst rooted in ours. It was about another time, whilst firmly rooted in the era in which the albums were created. Heck, even their album covers for me were phenomenal, as they self-consciously borrowed from the visual language of e.g. Soviet propaganda.

Who can forget the cover of The Man Machine? Many in the "West" didn't realise just how precise and telling the graphic design choices were, from the font to the poses and the colour scheme... We, in the "East", instantly recognised the language from posters all too familiar to us.

To say that Schneider and Kraftwerk were visionaries, well, it would be a much over-used understatement.

They showed me that it is possible to be immensely erudite, technological, compose music about a world of "robots" even, in strict and wide sense, too - but at the same time to be emotional under the surface, and create a truly unique high-tech melancholia. Nobody sounded like Kraftwerk - it was robotic on the surface, but deeply human under the surface.

Also, it was a complete antithesis of the communist propaganda's vision about a technological future. Latter was utterly dehumanised, with complete erosion of individuality... Kraftwerk depicted a downright romantic vision, even when they poked at the darker effects of technology. As robotic as their constructed imagery and performances may have been, the music was about the humans inhabiting the ultra-technological world of the future...

From their light and immensely popular tracks, which smashed up the walls around "laboratory" electronica and blasted it into popular mainstream, to the deeply atmospheric and philosophical compositions like the trailblazing Autobahn or Numbers, the list of era-defining works could go on and on.

Yes, era-defining as much as they were capturing the zeitgeist of respective eras... They even played with our perceptions and interpretations, one key example of double entendre being the track Radioactivity from the album with same title.

Schneider's attention to detail, technical inventiveness, conceptual thinking, and, of course, boundless imagination, has shaped even genres we would never associate with electronic music of any kind.

As he put it, "We have played and been understood in Detroit and in Japan, and that’s the most fascinating thing that could happen. Electronic music is a kind of world music. I think that the Global Village is coming.”

May you be now, for all eternity, in the realm of phenomenally intricate sounds of the Cosmos... Rest in peace...

Across time & space: The Thread by Russell Maliphant and Vangelis

All stills are from the trailer of The Thread

The Sadler's Wells dance production The Thread has set out, with its central concept of the mythological thread, to explore "changing forms of traditional Greek dance" via the choreography of Russell Maliphant and the music composed especially for this production by Vangelis.

Such opus then needed a composer who could seamlessly move between, and even combine, ancient and modern, demolishing any boundaries in our perceptions of what musical elements are supposed to be rooted in what frame of time and space.

If one needed another demonstration of how Vangelis is able to compose music that transcends many historic periods' and geographic areas' musical tradition, then the score for The Thread is certainly one.

Naturally, in the introduction to the video presentation that premiered on 17 April 2020, his soundtracks for Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire got a mention, but here we are in a musical world that is more familiar to those who know his extensive and impossibly multi-faceted discography, which spans a seemingly absurd range of genres and styles.

The video is based on the world premiere, which took place in spring 2019 - and it was streamed, then later made available for one week on the dance company's Youtube channel.

The opening, with its drone, its subdued percussive sounds, and evolving ancient-but-futuristic sounding melodic motifs reminds us of the overture to his El Greco studio album (not the soundtrack of same title).

This, and some other sections of the score, are reaching a level of pure beauty that is often hard to process even without the imagery. A few notes from the by-now characteristic and instantly recognisable harp-like synthesizer sounds Vangelis used in the soundtrack to the epic movie Alexander can conjure a sense of immense serenity, timeless beauty - and the dancers seem to be floating on the sound waves...

The lighting design adds to the superlative choreography by Russell Maliphant: the lights create virtual spaces, sometimes splitting up the dancers into separate scenes, producing ever-changing staging of the movements. During the meditative third section of the score, the lighting design and the camerawork create something that is an audiovisual bliss - its purity and simplicity is mesmerising.

In other sections of the score, Vangelis makes us feel as if Mother Earth is pulsating with some ancient rhythm, menacing at times, animating and life-affirming at other times. If we recall Asma Asmaton from the album Rapsodies, well, those very pulsations seem to be now emerging from some unimaginably deep geological structure buried under the stage... and they reverberate outward, after animating the dancers, with the waves dying off somewhere at the peripheries of our known Universe...

This is what it means to think in sounds, not in genres, not in styles, not in preconceived boundaries of time and space.

Sampled whirls of sounds, ancient woodwinds, organic woodwinds of long gone millennia, and Earth-shattering percussion are all coming together in the ballet's most animated sections. However, after every unleashing of thundering forces, we have a chance to recompose ourselves.

The emotional effect of going from Alexander-like percussive passages to the serenity of achingly beautiful harmonies (which remind us of the unique musical world of the albums Odes and Rapsodies) is similar to a feeling of gently dissolving in some caressing wash of sound waves.

The range of the musical concept is, simply put, phenomenal.

We go from minimalist, completely stripped-down elements to towering sonic constructs, from the sound of some ancient gathering in immemorable times to Byzantine celebrations of life forces to somewhere in the outer realms of the Cosmos.

Is it the sound of an ancient army gathering or just a distant fete in some settlement impossibly far from us in space and time?

Are those drums or are those tectonic plates colliding, volcanic forces throbbing under them?

Is that a synthesizer, a sampled and processed ancient instrument, or an ethnic acoustic instrument that we listen to through some immersive voyage in a time machine?

Are those ancient flutes' sound reaching us through some labyrinth of caves, which managed to hide from us for millennia? Or is that some imaginative use of state of the art electronics?

Does it matter?

Vangelis has always said, and this is why people classifying him as an electronic artist are consistently wrong:  he does not care where the sounds come from. Due to the possibilities of technology, he just happens to utilise many electronic instruments to achieve the sound colours he imagines.

The Thread is, and remains, another perfect example of that ethos...


Credits: Artistic conception from Georgia Iliopoulou; lighting by fellow Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist, the “choreographer of light”, Michael Hulls; costume design by award-winning London-based Greek fashion designer, Mary Katrantzou.

The quarantine waves...

Although one tries to resist the temptation for days and weeks, as the lockdown continues one eventually caves in... and posts a "quarantine playlist" of albums that seem to have originated from some other dimension, or have reached us via some electromagnetic waves emitted in some distant galaxy... or emerged from the habitat of previously not noticed tiny organisms.

Thus, on a personal note, a choice of a few albums that might just take someone else, too into the waves and vibrations of vast or infinitesimally small worlds.

The playlist is perhaps manageable in a single sitting (or, actually, lying...), but it needs a very quiet day with quite a few hours to just... be...

1. Tangerine Dream - Zeit 

Among the early, nowadays we would call it ambiental, albums by the veritable electronic music institution that Tangerine Dream has been since the 1960s, we have this double LP dating back almost fifty years...

The reason why I keep returning to this double album is that it is perhaps the most convincing example of 'space ambient'. What I understand and expect under that over-used label is music that simply seems to exist, without feeling that it is being performed by human beings, that there are instruments of any kinds involved in the process.

Zeit simply exists. It fills every available space in the room, in the house, it flows, it changes, it has currents and undulations. There are no shapes to hold on to, there are no structures to be self-conscious about.

It just is...

Yet, unlike many ambient drone music albums, it is constantly changing below its sometimes static-looking surface.

It is almost as if something, someone has managed to transpose into audible frequency range some radio telescope recording of the various electromagnetic activities spotted in distant galaxies.

2. Vangelis - Soil Festivities

On a quiet day, after a lengthy introduction via the sound waves and undercurrents of Zeit, the Greek grand master's mid-1980s concept album is immersing us into a very different world.

We go from the immense and the eminently "macro" to the delicate "micro" world, albeit latter is a very definitely terrestrial one.

Despite occasional sounds of summer storms and rain, this remains a phenomenal combination of minimalism and ambient music.

The delicate, obstinately repeating tiny motifs develop, constantly evolve, and get embellished by a discourse, sometimes a whole multi-party conversation, of other musical elements.

It could be the musical expression of the life of myriad tiny creatures in a rainforest on Earth, but it could equally be anywhere on some exotic other planet teeming with life. The pace of the musical evolution is hypnotising, the whole album has a dream-like quality whilst it seduces the mind with myriad, infinitesimal or large-scale, changes in the musical textures.

Speaking of textures, it is worth paying attention to just how every single synthesized timbre is chosen from the infinite possibilities of Vangelis's sonic laboratory - and how each timbre blends perfectly into the ever-evolving delicate textures.

Sublime, passionate at time, and precise in its dosing of musical energies... an album that is a very unusual and, to this day, unique interlude in the synth master's astoundingly varied output.

3. Michael Stearns - Encounter

The superlative American maestro of space ambient and world music-infused ambiental music has created something that is a rare example of thematic space music.

However, theme and track titles aside, one scandalous way to listen to this album is to not care about the intended narrative that wants to describe an encounter with an advanced alien civilisation.

We return to the world of Zeit, but here we have sometimes vast and thundering forces unleashed... the walls may wobble and neighbours in the street could wonder whether a UFO is actually in the process of landing somewhere.

There are many trademark elements in the compositional and sound design thinking that went into this Stearns album - characteristics that later we recognise in his masterpieces like the soundtracks to Ron Fricke's spellbinding Baraka or Samsara.

There are textures that shimmer and oscillate in mid-air in the room, there are huge floods of cosmic energies that storm through the room and fly off into the distance, leaving us stunned and mesmerised.

During this sonic voyage, we don't travel to distant galaxies, the Cosmos drops by for a visit...

4. Tangerine Dream - Rubycon

Just after their seminal Phaedra album, this one can leave one wondering whether it is the music of intricate inner or outer spaces.

It is, in its two tracks, a hypnotic voyage into some otherworldly spaces that seem to be at the same time cosmic and microscopic.

Maybe this is quantum music, that the late mastermind Edgar Froese talked about many decades later.

There is structure, there are tightly timed pulsations of impossible to grasp physical forces between particles, there are myriad infinitesimally tiny details and shifts in the forces at work... and there is, at the same time, complete fluidity and a sense of timelessness.

Like Soil Festivities, this seems to deep dive into a microworld - but this is not at the level of tiny living creatures, it is way, way below that.

We are listening to subatomic particles shaping up the vast constructs we see through telescopes...

5. Carbon Based Lifeforms - Twentythree

Unlike their pure ambient drone album VLA, this multi-part album has a rare combination of highly cerebral and emotive space ambient music.

It is a very rare experience, after having gone through many decades' output in aforementioned genre, to find something that is so abstract, so devoid of any tangible shape, but at the same time so emotionally charged.

The subtle melancholy of tracks like Held Together By Gravity is sublime and simply beautiful...

Although the creative duo, as we all know, is capable of thundering beats and trendy psy-trance vibes, too, this album is a phenomenally delicate affair.

Despite some of the track titles, which may be pointing us toward Earthly mysteries, we are in outer space... or, at best, in some caves nobody else has yet discovered.

The music gives us something to hold onto, there are tiny shapes we can see in the gaseous clouds, but it gives enough space for imagination to wonder. We can imagine whatever we want, especially if we do not look at the track titles.

6. John Serrie - The Stargazer's Journey

A relatively tiny journey to the American continent can keep us firmly in the sphere of utterly cosmic, but delicately emotive, space ambient.

One of the masters of space electronica from the other side of the Atlantic has this quite exquisite constellation hiding in his discography. It is recent, it is from the new Millennium, but, in a good sense, it sounds like the most stellar 1970s-1980s achievements of space music.

The entire sonic landscape has some intangible gentle melancholy, a sense of one dreaming to be somewhere else in some distant corner of the Cosmos, but at the same time feeling nostalgic about one's own home world.

To sculpt every sound and every transition between what seem to be undulations of gentle clouds of particles, but to make it all feel so fluid, effortless, and without tangible human intervention... well, we are back to the world of Zeit.

If Zeit started us off with the hidden vibrations and currents of indescribable cosmic interactions that exist and will continue to exist independently from us, The Stargazer's Journey is a slow flight among gas nebulae that trigger emotions in us by their, dare we say, otherworldly beauty.

In today's world, where music has been increasingly put into utilitarian pigeonholes (i.e. music meant to relax us, to heal us, to entertain us etc.), we ended up being extremely distant from the Pythagorean ideal of what the 'music of the spheres' is supposed to be.

Serrie's album is a good counterpoint. Yes, it can instantly relax us from it first few seconds, but it is something that defies expectations on what a 'space music' composer sets out to do and why...