“Electro Shock goes beyond the stereotypes of the Bang Bang and Tsitt Tsitt”
1 Can you feel it/Electro Love 4:28
2 Electric Feeling 3:04
3 Electric Smile 4:10
4 Electricity through the Heart (With Nattefrost) 4:44
5 Electricity in your Eyes 4:26
6 Electro Dreams 4:39
7 Electro Shock (With Nattefrost) 5:08
8 Electro Technology 4:23
9 Get Electrified Now 4:20
10 Robot Song 4:19
(CD 37:57) (V.F.)
(Elektro Synth-Pop Techno)
Remember Green is the musical project of Danish artist and musician Steen Chorchendorff Jorgensen. Launched during the last Electronic Circus Festival, on October 31, 2011, ELECTRO SHOCK is a first album. In fact, it's a kind of mini album that turns on a rather similar rhythmic approach. An album that benefits from the presence of Nattefrost on 2 tracks and that offers 10 tracks strongly impregnated by a Kraftwerk-like approach, with robotic voices that initiate most of the pieces and Teutonic rhythms that pulse in slightly morphic ambiences of an eroded Berlin School. It's a nice hybrid album that will appeal to both synth pop and Berlin School fans.
It's in a beautiful confusion of rhythms and ambiances that ELECTRO SHOCK opens. The sound is strong, and a jerky stroboscopic line surrounds a fomenting ambience that dithers between its rhythmic envelope and its soaring elements. If the first tones of Can you feel it-Electro Love let foresee a feverish rhythm, its unfolding is quite different. It is rather an ambience full of restraint which offers itself to our ears with percussions and circular pulsations pounding fractured rhythms around the sounds of industrial and electronic machines, robotic voices a la Kraftwerk and good melodious elements such as lines of piano and cosmic hazes. Moreover, the piano offers nice melodious samplings that crisscross the whole album. The rhythm comes and goes, dancing on a chubby bed of uncertain sequences, jerky pulses and the tssitt-tssitt of cymbals. Electric Feeling plunges us into the lunar rhythms with percussion/pulses, rolls and clicks of percussions rolling over a delicate rhythm trapped in a nice floating envelope, woven by a synth loaded of mellotron haze. Cosmic sound effects abound and enrich this musical structure, just like the other 9 tracks on ELECTRO SHOCK. Electric Smile offers a more flamboyant down tempo, more rhythmic and also heavier. The ambient and rhythmic fusion is delightfully provided by a good sequenced line that molds a nice fluted flow while the melodic approach is decorated by a piano with notes that wander into a strong electro-cosmic vibe. Much like several tracks here, Electricity Through the Heart opens with a vocoder. And even with a good circular and stroboscopic sequenced beat, as well as percussions with the rolls of a strange space military march, the rhythm of Electricity Through the Heart is hyper soft at the limit of hovering. And Nattefrost brings more lunar depth with layers of intense fog that coat a waltzing rhythm. Still on the same pattern, Electricity in your Eyes offers the first synth solos that sing on the ashes of another good down-tempo.
Curt percussions and fluted sequences support the slow and jerky rhythm of Electro Dreams. The track soaks in a beautiful cosmic envelope where the latent rhythm breathes the rhythmic approaches of Can you feel it-Electro Love. The more we go on in this album, the more we dive into rhythmic structures which are similar but whose fine variations attract our ears. This is how we will fall under the charm of the title-track whose approach is very Kraftwerk. A very musical synth covers a bed of sequences and percussions which froth with arrhythmic palpitations. Again, the rhythm is slow and rolls like a zombie gnawing its bone, while lines of strobe sequences shaped an approach filled with rhythmic confusion. Electro Technology is a beautiful cosmic ballad with slamming percussion and a superb spiral sequence that winds through a lascivious track with beautiful reminiscences of Tangerine Dream. Get Electrified Now is another beautiful ballad filled with mist. A mist sometimes stroboscopic that belts rolling percussion, jerky sequences and scattered notes of a piano that seeks itself in this lunar decor. Robot Song concludes ELECTRO SHOCK with a strong technoïd approach of the synth-pop years. The rhythm is driving with its huge synth layers that embrace the waltzing rhythms of the 80's. Jerky, arcing layers over a beautiful fusion of sequences and percussion that pulses around the piano samplings and galactic sounds. It's very good!.
Variations and subtleties over same themes! Still, this first album of Remember Green offers a dozen tracks that are strangely similar, with a few variations. Except that Steen Chorchendorff goes beyond the stereotypes of Bang Bang Boum Boum Tsitt Tsitt with an interesting dosage of rhythms sometimes slow, sometimes heavy and sometimes more intense that wander in morphic envelopes. If it destabilizes at the beginning, we get quickly charmed by this album coming from nowhere and which deserves to come out of anonymity.
Sylvain Lupari (December 24th, 2011) *****