Together in Electric Dreams

Together in Electric Dreams

Xanthus: Ghosts of the West Pier

Digital Dreams: The Very Best Of

In the early to mid-70s, prior to the punk explosion, with a few notable Progressive exceptions, Rock Music was in a largely self-indulgent phase with the main emphasis being on filling stadiums with fans wanting to contemplate their idols’ navels by gazing up the legs of their flared loon-pants.

The one area where there was any interesting development was in electronic and experimental music. Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Beaver & Krause and Faust were producing stuff at the serious end of the market while the likes of Jean Michel Jarre and Giorgio Moroder were taking care of the poppier end. This led eventually to great strides in the development of disco music, the 80s Techno & Electro trends and, of course, the Arthur Baker/Afrika Bambaataa influence on Hip-Hop.

One of the things militating against a mass movement in electronica in those days was the cost of computer equipment and software and the technical know-how required to manage it. That’s not to say there was any lack of creativity among those who had access to such things. But the form was always a minority genre. The advent of the Casio keyboard and drum machine together with the revolution in home computing and recording changed all that and gradually more and more people have been drawn into using electronic media for the production of music. Many of the greatest effects of this have been felt in the Dance/Rave and Ambient/Trance/Chill Scenes where electronically-produced music has become almost the norm rather than the exotic exception it once was.

So, we are now living in an age where the use of electronic instrumentation is commonplace across the musical spectrum and musicians are able to produce very complex recordings in their bedrooms and reproduce it on stage with ease. The vast majority of this use is as an adjunct to conventional instrumentation and within the confines of everyday pop musical form. But there are still quite large numbers of musicians composing interesting experimental extended pieces in similar vain to those of the early pioneers of the 60s and 70s. Exploration of MySpace will reveal the extent of this fact.

I recently reviewed the splendid Kraftwerk-like ZZZZZZ’z CD ‘Holeigans’ and also the stunning downloads available from Sombre Gravity. Subsequently I have been showered by friend requests from experimental artists and enjoyed the arrival by mail of electronica CDs. I will deal with a couple of them, here. I hope they will convince you that the diversity of styles in this erstwhile narrow genre of music is well worth exploring.

Xanthus: Ghosts of the West Pier XAN 003

www.myspace.com/xanthusproductions

This is for me a local production – Xanthus, hailing from here in Brighton, UK. Here is a musician who has clearly thrived on the same electronic innovators as myself in the same time period. The influences of Tangerine Dream and Jean Michel Jarre are both very obvious throughout this recording, but the inclusion of all manner of other techniques makes for a highly original selection of tunes. Xanthus uses sound and voice sampling from found sources, dance beats and modern stylings – for example, Junglism and D’n’B - to bring the music of those early masters bang up to date in a wide variety of ways. So we end up with an album of brilliant tunes that will stand the test of time and serve the purposes as both ambient background and entertaining foreground listening. An ideal CD for listening on a long journey in the car!

Digital Dreams: The Very Best Of

http://www.myspace.com/digitaldreams2008

Here’s a collection of compositions by German born Irish resident Thomas ‘TJ’ Janak recorded over the last 20 years. On my first listen the wide variety of styles covering that time period agitated me quite a bit as there seemed to be a lack of cohesiveness in the album. But subsequent hearings have allowed me to appreciate this variation as a positive rather than a negative. A compilation can only very rarely be heard as a concept album in the true sense of the term and it should not be listened to as one – which had been my initial mistake.

Without going through the 18 diverse tracks one-by-one, which I do not intend to do, it’s quite difficult to compose a definitive descriptive commentary on the compilation. I will say, though, that this CD is full of wry humour and exciting rhythmic settings which will repeatedly cause you to sit up, pay attention and then want to listen again. Plus it’s always great to hear the German language used in electronic compositions – it seems a totalling natural pairing.

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