COSMIC GROUND: Cosmic Ground (DDL on Studio Fleisch)
This release from 2014 features 96 minutes of retro electronic music.
Cosmic Ground is Dirk Jan Muller (the keyboardist from Electric Orange).
Some old school retro electronics here.
A rolling cascade of throbbing pulsations, chasing the tails of the notes before them, snowballing into a sequence that undulates on and on, sweeping the listener along with its sinuous urgency.
Hosts of deep-voiced synthesizers drone away, generating a luscious nest of twirling threads that intermingle without ever getting tangled. If anything, fresh melodies are created by the gestalts. The music progresses through a variety of these emphatic passages, peaks in the elongated flow of each track's never-ending riffs.
One might almost suspect this music has no percussion...but then that rapid-pulse chord speeds up and becomes a drumbeat, ultimately passing into a state of tonal viscosity. A percentage of the keyboard riffs can be considered percussive from their pounding nature.
And then things go weird for a while, with meandering diodes sliding into a delicate keyboard refrain. Inevitably, though, the music's temperament reverts to retro with serpentine threads of ethereal definition contrasting with an undercurrent of celestial organ chords.
Overall, this album is a solid journey back to the Seventies, deep into the nucleus of the Berlin School of Electronics. These influences are masterfully modernized by Muller, built upon, not recycled. His compositional skills excel at building with tones. As the album continues, the mood turns cosmic and atmospheric, but hardly minimal. A lush tapestry of fragile sounds conspire to establish an intensely seductive trance state. There's even a touch of angelic background textures to enhance one song's finale.
The album ends with a piece that is poignantly reverent to the treatment of droning organs in electronic music. Periodic outbursts of spacey effects attempt to distract the keyboard from its droney delineation. But a rising tide of pattering keys overwhelms everything and continues to unfurl its way to a gentle conclusion.
A wonderful dose of prime retro electronics, familiar sounds put to new use.
| Entire page © 2014 Matt Howarth. All rights reserved. |
Webpage design by
 |