“It took my time but I ended up liking these structures always on the move in their scents of Tangerine Dream's hardiest era to sound like”
1 Ambient Waves 9:13
2 Colours of the Universe 3:00
3 Interstellar 5:44
4 Constellations 4:38
5 Age of the Universe 10:38
6 Time Spiral 5:54
7 Meteor Fields 6:22
8 Cosmic Waves 9:15
(DDL 54:45) (V.F.)
(Berlin School, E-Rock)
It took me a while, but I finally got there! Got there to listening this album fully whose homogeneity within each title becomes a disturbing element. It was my friend Nick who put me in the footsteps of The Fourth Dimension Project. This project by a single musician, Péter Pósafalvi, comes to us from Hungary, more precisely from Budapest. Like several artists exhibiting their works on Bandcamp, TFDP was productive when it put its music on the Web in 2016. Seven albums were thus offered between 2016 and 2018, including a Best of TFDP at end of 2017. Since 2018, it's an album a year that Péter offers to EM fans who are keenly interested in Tangerine Dream's descendent. COSMIC WAVES was launched in March 2019. A good album inspired by progressive underground music and by Tangerine Dream which went under the radar and which most certainly deserves to be known.
Ambient Waves will surprise you with its many rhythmic as well as harmonic reversals for a track barely exceeding 9 minutes. First, the guitar! Ambient Waves opens with its dust floating in a black cosmos. The rhythm which surprises it is sculpted in the leaps of bass sequences. Sequences which extend a carpet of reverberations and whose spasms of its roaring firmly fix the base of a rhythm which the keyboard supports by a melody. A melody forged in these luminous sequences and arpeggios jumping in sharp intervals, a bit like in Thief. Percussions, percussive elements and sequences cement the basis of a rhythm that has become neurotic when the guitar solos reinforce the harmonic side which breathes a little bit some Asian tunes. It moves a lot within its first 4 minutes! We are at a stage where the sequences and the percussive effects dance and jump in the harmonious vision of the synth and its chords tingling like the fruits of a xylophone in a good soft-rock performed under the stars. These changes into the structures require a good open-mindedness for anyone who is interested in the music of this album. Except for Colors of the Universe which invites us to a good lunar walk. Interstellar is born from the growing shadows of a sound task which grows around cosmic ambiences. The guitar sculpts good solos with a vision close enough to David Gilmour. The dark waves propel the music towards sober percussions where the loops of the guitar frolic on a slow rhythm that a huge line of bass brings in its groove of cosmic blues. The guitar and keyboard solos make love in the last third of the title and in a wilder vision that will stand without knowing ecstasy. Constellations is too a good lunar ballad led by a guitar and its bundle of dreams wandering in cosmos. This ride reaches a point of no return after 3:20 minutes with a synth layer and its dark shadow which offers a piano structure floating in the cosmic abyss.
A seraphic breeze propels the first movement of Age of the Universe. A piano extends a vision of ancient melody that a flute roots in this perception. I think of Pergamon with this flute which flits in loops on the threat of a bass sequence and its uncertain tremolo. The rhythm that explodes after 3:30 takes a tangent of electronic rock from the Ricochet years with an upward movement of the sequencer and a vampiric melody from the keyboard. The mellotron is effective, but especially the guitar which literally sounds like Edgar did so well in those years. The six-string follows this electronic rock which fills our heads with memories when the rhythm subsides around 8 minutes. A slow rhythm awaits us, concluding a title where the discourse of John F. Kennedy seems inappropriate to me in this good structure which takes us between the phases of the Stratosfear and Force Majeure years to the years of Private Music. A rock guitar brings us into a short phase of spiritual reflection at the opening of Time Spiral. Its chords are in the field of progressive rock, just like this rhythmic ride which settles down with fluty chants from a childish cavalry. The rhythm gallops in an electronic structure well supported by keyboard riffs with TD tones and a good bass line. It runs in the shadows of a mellotron which injects its fluty mist as well as its orchestrations. Suddenly, Time Spiral takes a quite a whole direction with a sequenced flow which makes duel with electronic percussions. This is where guitar and synth solos bring a brief inspiration of electronic rock to this title always molded in the essences of Tangerine Dream of the Jive years.
Meteor Fields is a beautiful soft-rock progressing like a slow spiral dance. Keyboard chords hang around this lunar ballad with tunes and ends of harmonies, as well as some effects, borrowed from the worlds of Legend and Le Parc. The title-track ends this first contact with the music of The Fourth Dimension Project with an approach that sticks to the music of Green Desert. The percussions fall with an echo effect while the synth tunes a vision very close to Shine on you Crazy Diamond. Not that the guitar sounds like! No, it takes unknown paths while the sequencer activates a movement that comes and goes, like this squirrel looking for its booty from last fall. This first phase, more ambient than animated, stops around 5 minutes, while the keyboard dissects a circular rhythm which is lost in a session of percussive clicks. A good moment that will not explode, but will rather lead us into the spheres of an EM without a port to secure its destiny…
Indeed, this COSMIC WAVES is worth stopping at and downloading it for a small $ 8.00 US. It's good EM that requires a little adaptation period, but which ultimately finds its way to please us.
Sylvain Lupari (April 29th, 2020) ***½**
Available at TFDP Bandcamp