“My thoughts are always torn when my ears are deafened by the hummings of Boom-Boom, but all in all this album remains a nice ICDM album...”
1 Follow the Thread 5:58 2 Drop 5:58 3 Inspired 8:22 4 Simply Ethereal 7:08 5 The Mysterious 8:12 6 The Greatest Mystery 6:59 7 Reverberation 7:46 8 Earth Two 7:26 9 Unpublished 3:22 10 Like Angels 5:43 MellowJet Records | cdr-mo1601 (CD-r 66:52) (V.F.) (Intelligent Cosmic Dance Music)
For the second consecutive year, Moonbooter is at the Cosmic Night Event, which takes place at the Münster Planetarium in Germany, along with an artist of his own label MellowJet Records. Otarion succeeds Wellenfeld for this event by interpreting 4 titles of his last album, Constellations and the Red Thread Front while that Moonbooter goes also for 4 selections of his latest album Cosmoharmonics. The music is intense and without interruptions, the 2 musicians playing together, in a concert where the soles of the feet probably heat up and the ears buzz hours later! And a fact to underline, both artists propose also an unedited title for the encores.
The show starts with the intense Follow the Thread from the German artist Otarion. Ambivalent structure of rhythm where the abrupt phases, and others more static, with effects that will remind to some of us the Techno New-wave approach of Orchestral Maneuver in the Dark going in and out in a delicate harmonic shroud, this title from the Constellations and the Red Thread Front album is a pretty good appetizer to this mini festival of Cosmic Dance Music. Moonbooter follows with the jumpy beat of Drop. The swirling sequences and the vocoder seem surprisingly bound to Follow the Thread. If 2 first tracks fit marvellously, the same goes for the solid Inspired, shortened of 4 minutes here, and the hypnotic trance spiral which is Simply Ethereal. And in spite of the very Techno Dance approach, the music of Moonbooter and Otarion inhales of lightness by sitting down more on the hymns than on a full excess of effects and pastiches artifices which are too strongly used by the designers of the kind. Both keep also this small floating side of cosmic EM with The Mysterious which does very Vangelis and futurist too. The danceable and heavy approach of The Greatest Mystery, one of the most solid titles of Cosmoharmonics, is more than opportune at this moment of the show. And bound to the explosive, everything is relative in electronic cosmic music, Reverberation as well as in the very slow, dense and orchestral Earth Two, a very good title a la Jarre from Moonbooter; We are entering in the pinnacle of this show. And now the presents! The unedited music pieces... Otarion's Unpublished respects in every aspect the very Teutonic approach of the Düsseldorf School that Rainer Klein has groped around in his last album. However, the short length of the title makes so that Otarion seems to have the hands tied, him who excels at the art to weave harmonies tinted of melancholy on his hymns of Germanic dance. But Moonbooter is capable of making burn a dance floor with his capacity to incorporate the acrid vapors of Berlin School in his sledgehammer rhythms, such as in Like Angels. Let's say that with these 2 unpublished titles, the spectators had to have feet on fire due to skipping relentlessly.
Half in earnest, half in jest, my thoughts are always torn when my ears are deafened by the hummings of the pulsations (boom-boom) of the inexhaustible rhythms of dance. If the recipe worked very well the past year with Moonbooter vs Wellenfeld, she is going to take off even more with this last version of this Cosmic Night Event because the music of Constellations and the Red Thread Front fits more to this event than the music of Elements from Wellenfeld. The Wave being pure dynamite! We have to underline too the clear musical complicity of Moonbooter and Otarion. At the end of the day, I had a pretty nice time listening to this MOONBOOTER VS OTARION: Live Munster 2016 which ends to be a is a good album of Intelligent Cosmic Dance Music without those perpetual sterile subtleties that makes of it something so useless from times to times!
Sylvain Lupari (February 27th, 2017) *****
Available at MellowJet Records