DREAM & DESIRE

Dream & Desire is very much in the same style as Manuel Gottsching's Ashra albums New Age of Earth and Blackouts with a small touch of Schulze. Each of the 3 reasonably lengthy tracks on this album have a unique feel compared to each other, which makes this a nice sampler of the various Gottsching styles.

As the name might suggest, "Dream" is quite dreamy sounding. The meat of this track is mainly Gottsching's softly played krautrock style electric guitar looping in the presence of a typically light and very German beat and intermittent symphonic synths that improve the overall grandiosity that is implied by its 30 minute runtime.

"Desire" is where the profound Schulze influence comes in. The wavering, ghostly synths are very Schulze, and the authentic guitar sound of "Dream" is traded for a much more electronically treated synth guitar effect, but it works to make this track much more epic. What makes this track stand out, in my opinion, is the strong sense of '80s pop melodicism in the beat and the main melody, which greatly improves the accessibility of this track and makes it much positive sounding that it would otherwise.

"Despair" is the shortest of the three tracks and marks the return of the authentic guitar sound with Gottsching soloing melodically from the half-way point onward. This is also the most upbeat track, which kind of contrasts with the track's title, but like the others it is very minimalist symphonic in composition. It's a good track but not as interesting as the previous two, though the guitar tone will be very desirable for krautrock fans.

Overall, Dream & Desire is a good progressive electronic album in a very krautrock kind of style that mixes the well-established monolithic sound structures of Schulze and Tangerine Dream with a strong element of joviality from ethereal (as opposed to the usual dark) melodic decisions.