“If you are interested in progressive techno, pay yourself a treat and take a listening to the music PJ Skyman”
1 Strange Intro (Very Strange) 2:04
2 Windows of Paradise 5:54
3 Dream Ltd. 4:30
4 The Key in the Door 10:29
5 Néon (French Mix) 5:37
6 Out of Railways 3:23
7 If your Laser was destroyed by a Cinatomic Universal Producer of Nature :56
8 Emergency 7:34
9 Last Jumble (Parts 1 & 2) 15:02
10 Jump to the Beat 5:13
(DDL 60:46) (V.F.) (Électronica)
Although I am a true EM lover of the Berlin School and /or the floating genre, I like to go with a good Electronica once in a while. Artists like Juno Reactor, Chemical Bros and Prodigy have their charms, even if it's pressed with fossil decibels in the bottom of the eardrums. PJ Skyman is a French artist who sent me an email asking me to listen to his music. I downloaded it and the first listen left me cold. A beat drummed widly on electronic skins beneath synths with raucous chords and hiccuping spirals is not really my definition of progressive Techno. But I kept his file, unfortunately not his email, and once in a while I listened to it. And like that, on a good day it worked on me.
I hooked with The Key in the Door. On its hesitant cymbals and a heavy jerky sequence encircling a rhythm with multiple twists and turns of its spasmodic carcass. It's like an incessant wave which goes up and down, but vertically. And I started to listen to the other titles, to finally find it rather interesting. It's obvious, it's techno! Techno a little cracked but with intelligence. We feel that PJ Skyman has structures and ideas, that he quite easily expresses like on Out of Railways and its incisive percussions and the dementia of the DJ who is really irrelevant with his haunted layers. It's experimented madness! Not my cup of tea, but I liked the throbbing beat of Emergency, while the resistance piece remains Last Jumble. You must not have a headache while listening this one. But the minimalist pulsion that is stuck on an annoying chord is the ideal pretext for the slow construction of this track with rhythms in hypnotic loops that surrounds us all along the 15 minutes of its progression. Madness to take at little doses. And if you think energy needs to be rationed, go to Jump to the Beat. Even Prodigy didn't think about it. If you are interested in progressive techno, pay yourself a treat and take a look at http://www.pjskyman.com/thedm.html. You will find the equivalent of 3 cd-r of good audio quality (320kbps). And just because it's free doesn't mean it's not really good. Not at all!
Sylvain Lupari (March 27th, 2007) *****
Available at PJ Skyman Music