“You have to love music to love Lysergic Dream! You have to love an audacious and meditative music”
1 Protonebula (Crossing the Wall) 22:07 2 Lysergyca 8:57 3 Mental Hideaway 10:33 4 Hauntingly Beautiful Visions 16:20 5 Unusual Road to Donsak 9:12 6 Ephymera 5:28 7 Jump to Infinity 3:47 Neuronium Music
(CD 76:22) (V.F.) (Ambient ,Pscychotronic EM)
Neuronium! One of the oldest artists/bands in EM, Neuronium is the electronic psychotronic rock side of Michel Huygen who has a solo career as much productive, in a kind of more meditative music, than his project of band which gets dissolved with years to become finally also a solo project. LYSERGIC DREAM is in the lineage of Jamais Vu with its full of contemplative music of which the rights for cerebral wanderings are besmirched by some prettily convoluted structures of rhythm. And how goes our friend Michel? Well I would say that even after 32 albums under the sign of Neuronium and 20 solo albums, our Spanish Edgar Froese has not only something interested to propose, he redefines the borders of Neuronium, a little like Digital Dream did in 1980, with an approach, both at the level of the sound and of the structure of composition, which transcends his own sound horizons and which gives a second breath to his music, if not to EM.
Protonebula (Crossing the Wall) leads us to this analysis as soon as the first notes of a synth guitar are piercing a soft fog poisoned by orchestral layers which float like a waltz with as companion some electronic noises, as organic than futurist. Beautiful angelic voices begin to hum some 120 seconds after the opening of Protonebula (Crossing the Wall). We float on the wings of Vangelis here with very good orchestrations and layers of voices which pull more and more at these hairs' arms which bristle as soon as the thread of our emotions wakes up. Everything is very quiet, almost as in a pension for forsaken souls in search of mercy. The false guitar scatters its pinched notes and its riffs running in this fabulous union between tears of violins and of voices. We wait for an explosion here, but it's rather another hyper meditative phase which floats in the air with a superb celestial voice which expiates harmonies without words. It's around the 15th minute that the rhythm section of Protonebula (Crossing the Wall) awakes. And as much to say it straightaway, it's the first time that my ears meet such a structure. A movement of the sequencer throws ethereal rhythmic loops and the synth regurgitates fat chords which spread a fascinating slow and circular structure of rhythm. Synth layers, filled with orchestrations in the tones of the Tangerine Dream of the 80's, decorate this strange structure which is now fed by percussions filled with vaporous metallic effects. Not lively for two cents, but not necessary a food for meditation, this structure of organic as electronic rhythm breathes such as a big monster which remains curled up in its den of atmospheres. Only the last minutes of Protonebula (Crossing the Wall) proposes a pure and hard rhythm with a lively movement of the sequencer which makes a series of keys spin like these structures of rhythm without gasoline for the feet of the analog years. Troubling and effective, Protonebula (Crossing the Wall) sets the tone to an album which is definitely not for timorous ears. You have to love music. You have to love an audacious and meditative music.
Lysergyca approaches our ears with some electronic noises which are attracted by beautiful orchestral layers. If the music is purely of ambiences, its delicacy and the way Michel Huygen is doing to make us float are pure elixirs against stress, against the agitation of the senses. His delicate fingers draw movements of ethereal waltz where our soul derives to the sound of these astral harmonies. On this album, Michel Huygen has strolled in heavens with his notebook in order to gather the most beautiful voices of angels and set up a wonderful angelic choir. The small concerto which charms our ears around the 7th minute is an obvious proof. Quiet, very quiet Lysergyca opens a door on melancholy which continues on the very beautiful and soft Mental Hideaway where Neuronium has never sounded so much like Vangelis, and the very poignant Hauntingly Beautiful Visions among which the 16 minutes of purely ambient structure will never have seemed long. After these units of meditative music, Unusual Road to Donsak comes to put the disorder with a structure livened up by a will to seduce these ears difficult to fill and who were seduced by this complex movement of Protonebula (Crossing the Wall). This is some very creative rhythm! Ephymera is another morphic and meditative structure. We expect the same thing with Jump to Infinity and its opening which is coated by a Gregorian chant. Except that Michel Huygen likes to amaze and to surprise us. It's thus with a very beautiful electronic rhythm, borrowed to the Franke, Froese & Schmoelling years, that Jump to Infinity feed our ears of nostalgia and completes a surprising album which does a break in time to make a jump which will exceed it.
Sylvain Lupari (August 8th, 2017) *****
Available at Neuronium and CD Baby