“With its vision of Software in deep space moods, Solar Walk from Realtime has everything to please to those who miss the golden days of IC”
1 Solar Walk 11:46 2 Zero Gravity Zone 8:32 3 Running Asteroids 5:17 4 Outer Space 7:31 5 Voyage to Virgo 9:00 6 Galactic Motion 7:26 7 Lunar Dance 6:12 8 Dark Planet 11:01 SynGate | CD-RRT03
(CD-r 66:50) (V.F.) (Ambient, New Berlin School)
A soft haze with a bluish misty rain unfolds the morphic approach of Solar Walk. The intro is weaved by hollow winds, by ethereal breaths and by absent voices which intertwine and melt themselves in an absolute cosmic contemplativity. It's a little like watching Perseids waltzing within rotary spatial currents. The ambient phase mutates gradually its immobilism for tom-toms which drum a discreet rhythm, a kind of one needed to accompany the solitude of falling stars. Ambient, the rhythm of the title-track paints a progression which is equal to its environment. An interstellar landscape which grows richer and denser, and where cosmic gases, shooting stars, virgin voices and a heap of iridescent sonic effects weave a rich musical pattern whose thick blanket of sounds encircles and smothers those drumming which rumble louder without ever set ablaze the meditative ambiences. SOLAR WALK from Realtime, a new German duet consisted of Thomas Bock and Norbert Hensellek, is another beautiful find by the German label SynGate. The Teutonic music style duet is inspired by those ambient spiral rhythms that Software weaved in the hidden recesses of Innovative Communication by plunging into the nice time of New Berlin School where the hypnotic structures spun indefatigably in luxurious envelopes of a cosmos painted in digital colors. Strings of sequences which gravitate in some soft winds. Such is the best way of describing these delicious morphic rhythms that Realtime is offering all along the 67 minutes that last SOLAR WALK. Spherical rhythms which feed of cosmic ambiences and of Morpheus' choirs. Welcome back in these beautiful years of the New Berlin School.
Mesmerizing and hypnotic, Zero Gravity Zone is swirling on sequences of which the fine undulations awaken the sighs of Orion's mermaids. The rhythm is circular and borrows these timeless spirals where the subtle nuances are the only manners to escape a transitory hypnosis. My first very favorite goes to Running Asteroids. We are pretty quick hooked by this delicate stroboscopic spiral where percussions, full of convoluted tones, feed the hiccups of a line of sequences and its crystal clear keys which cavort all over on a spheroidal movement of which the ringings of prism exhilarate the voices of oracles and chords lost in dense sclerosing mists. Do I hear a guitar solo towards the finale? This is quite good and breathes on a stunning Berliner mood. And the more we move forward and the more we are immersed in that Teutonic mood which clears vapors as cosmic as the melodic ambient rhythms of Software. After a very ambiospherical intro, Outer Space gets free out of oblivion to offer its finely jerked spirals built around silk baguettes which manhandle anvils of glass. Although very beautiful, the symbiosis of sequences and percussions doesn't intoxicate as much as the slow structure which waves upright in some morphic mists and voices to the grave intonations which adorn by a mystic tint a timeless waltz which took root some years before. Magnetic and bewitching! Two terms which describe marvellously these sound arcs which swirl all around here. Adorned of dreamy voices which hum in the borders of space, Journey to Virgo offers a slow rhythm. A peaceful rhythm where we get lost in the cosmic vastnesses, quite as Galactic Motion and its delicate stroboscopic rhythmic worm which on the other hand attracts the hearing more quickly, and the morphic rhythm of Lunar Dance, sustained by Teutonic percussions as much sober than the brook of sequences which sparkles upright into ambiences à la Jean-Michel Jarre. Dark Planet ends this symphony of slow spheroidal rhythms which wind the structures of SOLAR WALK. Here, as somewhere else, the delicate, and hardly perceptible, nuances as well as the cabrioles to fragile uncertain jolts shape a spiral of which the imperfect rotations excite this fascination that the fan has for this minimalist universe fill by rotary sequences weavers of earworms became so often inexplicable. The ambiences and the musical envelope? These are pure cosmic fantasies. Slow synth pads, few solos but deep moods, which blow iridescent laments, draw digital soniclands and starry walls where celestial bodies and shining stars live of an artificial life but oh how much musical. Static rhythms in cosmic soundscapes; SOLAR WALK has everything to please the fans of New Berlin School. Simple but effective. Sober and beautiful. In the purest respect for the cosmic and digital structures of the IC years.
Sylvain Lupari (August 4th, 2013) ***½**
Available at SynGate Bandcamp