“This is a great album of these so famous ambient rhythms linked to this New Berlin School we have here. Hat to you Thomas Meier...”
1 Funky Planet 15:08
2 2012 DA 14 5:59
3 Sine Tempore 7:23
4 Cum Tempore 12:47
5 Magno Cum Tempore 17:08
6 Maximo Cum Tempore 19:06
(CD-r/DDL 77:31) (V.F.)
(New Berlin School)
Released at the end of 2013, AUSCULTARE is an album which totally went unnoticed at this crazy period of the year where the musical novelties flood a market which has not enough ears, nor of money, for all these small jewels which go out at the same time. And it's a pity because this last Thomas Meier's album is quite a whole jewel of New Berlin School style. Without reinventing the wheel, even if the author indicates rightly the very first use of the analog synthesizer GRP A4 on Magno Cum Tempore, TM Solver regilds all the same the coat of arms of a style which seems to live again constantly of its hypnotic charms with soft rhythms which swirl and swirl in our head, as souvenirs of another time nevertheless always very present. I loved it. In fact, I adored it and the album is among those that flirt for sure on my Top 10 list in 2013!
And that begins with Funky Planet and its delicate morphic rhythm built on a pattern of sequences whose mismatched lines of movements are jumping, like balls wrapped up in felt-tip, in a rhythmic choreography which swirls such as a lunar Cha-cha. The synth lines are mellifluously vaporous. They exhale an oneiric perfume of ether and of mysticism with these seraphic voices while vaporizing delicate breezes of solos. Solos which snivel languishingly on this delicate structure of rhythm and of its multidimensional interlacing as much fragile as these arpeggios which are skipping into a deep and dense foggy engorged of an iridescent drizzle. We are into cosmic, minimalist certainly, but deliciously hypnotic beats. I love and it starts things pretty well. More ambient and clearly more melancholic, 2012 DA 14 offers a beautiful endless cosmic ascent with fine sequences which climb timeless stairways by wearing on their fragile rhythmical paces the weight of a whole arsenal of mists and of astral voices. Sine Tempore offers also a delicate rhythm, rather morphic may I add, which sparkles and sounds like a concert of carillons under the breezes of a nasal synth. This very melancholic synth spreads its sorrow in a good lyrical vision where the solos are chanting and the violins are crying along the seraphic voices on a tempo which livens up and fades out on this enchanting binary movement of the sequencer, one line is for the drumming and the other is clinking here, like almost everywhere in the adjacent corridors of AUSCULTARE. Of what to bewitch and solicit the most temperamental of the listenings. Cum Tempore proposes a more syncretic electronic envelope where hollow winds and bright breaths get lost in lunar orchestrations. A slow movement of bass sequences braids a furtive rhythm which climbs an abstract slope where are hooting and are whining quantity of synth lines in perfumes and tones charmingly hybrid. Some sound effects burst here and there, punctuating the track of a psychotronic approach which calms down its reason into other more musical lines.
With the quadrilogy of time, we enter in the best part of the album.
Splendid with its long movement of sequences of which the skeleton bends over backwards for its articulations, Magno Cum Tempore seems to be the equivalent of a stem cell taken out of Software's lunar atmospheres and rhythms, in their superb Add Space to Time from Electronic Universe Part I, with a rhythmic ritornello so much near that we actually believe to hear a remix decorated with a more luxuriant sound fauna. The rhythm and the sequences are always bouncing like silk balls in a long spheroidal corridor, at all times very harmonious, while the heterogeneous and organic tones as well as fragmented whispers bring Magno Cum Tempore towards another level of contemplativity. This is really good. It's the kind of music piece that we can hear all day long and still be seduced because of a particle of elements (broken chords, seraphic voices unusual noises, etc.) which are constantly grafted here and there. Maximo Cum Tempore adopts a little the same minimalist and hypnotic pattern, but with a bit more velocity in the movement. Dancing on the perfumes of lightness, the sequences flow as fast as grass-snakes which go down a vertical wall, while the electronic percussions and their scents of old Jean-Michel Jarre add a rustic cachet to a Berlin School style restored by the modernity of new equipment. Other lines of sequences, more harmonious, get loose from these allegorical coronel, darkening this other long piece of pretty nice evasive melodies which coo in astral mists and fluid solos to the fragrances of passivity. This is beautiful New Berlin School quiet, hypnotic, very cosmic and deliciously melodic; here is of what is made this other really good album from TM Solver. Let's hope there is still some money left!
Sylvain Lupari (October 9th, 2014) ****½*
Available at SynGate Bandcamp