JONAS REINHARDT

All of the tracks on this album have the "smoke-filled room" atmosphere to them because of the cloudy production. The analog synth sound on this album will definitely feel comfortable to older fans of this type of music, but Jonas Reinhardt isn't adding anything interesting or new to the mix, which is the only reason why this sound works so well for other artists such as Boards of Canada who also use vintage analog synth sound. Each track, being anywhere from 3 to 6 minutes in length, don't really have enough room to develop. This wouldn't be a problem if each track fed off of its preceding track in a "continuous song" kind of format, but each track is singular and undeveloped, resulting in 9 tracks of retro meandering.

Because Jonas Reinhardt has been making this type of music for a few years now, the group should by now be more comfortable in exploring what possible greatness this type of sound can offer. The comfort zone here has been worn out for decades, and has even been done way better than this album has. This isn't a bad album, and I'd definitely recommend it to fans of this genre that want something that is at least modern (as in recorded and released recently), but for the rest of us who want something a bit more engaging and creative, we should listen to Jonas Reinhardt's more interesting contemporaries such as the aforementioned Zombi or Boards of Canada.

This album contains some highly dreamy atmospherics, which, just as surely as levitating hot-dogs and peppermint safaris, will take the listener back to those hazy and warbling soundscapes once cooked up by artists like Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. In other words: It is a one way ticket to a wonderful dementia filled to the brim of everything that makes this style of music fluid and luminescent.

Jonas Reinhardt is a modern electronic conjurer, who plays every shimmering synthesizer on here. These produce some eerie and trance inducing musical sculptures, that, very similarly to those you´ll find in the likes of Harmonia, Cluster and the aforementioned German deities, will cloud your outlook on life in surrealistic shadings.

Although this album has 13 different tracks, these often stick together like plastered subsonic puzzle pieces, and even if the occasional silence steps in to let you know about the closing of one - pretty soon you´ll be chugging along on another wide robotic tick tocking eagle winged affair - sounding like musical helicopters over serene moog lands with bursting colours and pacing sequencers in full bloom. That is just another way of explaining how vital and fluid this album sounds - and feels.

It took me some time to get into the thing, because oddly enough I initially thought there was too much happening all at once, and maybe that is because I´ve developed an unhealthy relationship with the works of Klaus Schulze and his mighty swaying wheat fields of sound, because in all honesty - Jonas Reinhardt lies buried deep within the classic Berlin School of electronics - y´know those that rely mostly on ambient whiffs of synthesizer laden breezes bobbing along in the swaying robotic current. Saying things like: There´s too much happening, is like heralding Opeth as a mild and docile new age act.

I don´t think this record is out to reinvent the wheel, and there´s certainly no added points regarding innovation, but frankly I couldn´t give a rat´s arse, when the music feels like cooling off your half baked body straddling it over a cool metal sheet grandpa chair, after an exhausting day with lots of running, talking, moaning, typing, eating, checking things under a white coal like circle in the clouds - feeling the slow burn of solar warmth whilst cruising the urban rooftops, - and you suddenly realize that grandpa´s chair is such a nice and meditative place to be - and you start wondering why you had to do all that running around just to get your aching gummy bear body into this friendly and cool structure.

This album summed up in a sentence? Slow stuttering brightly feathered oscillations, with an electric spastic hand clapper attached to the rhythm section.