JACK HERTZ

Looking at some of the highlights, the ringing distorted rising/falling slivers, swirling effects and lulling drones of `Birds Nest at the Coastline' call to mind the early `Krautrock'-era Tangerine Dream albums, and the lightly psychedelic `Frozen Coast' is dreamy n' drowsy with no shortage of twitching electronic wisps. Soothing ambient caresses that pepper `Giant Lens' are flecked with jaggedly cavernous unease and pulsing loops, and the ethereal hums of `Heaven's Slide' weave between a backdrop of field recordings of steam powered vessels to craft an evocative soundworld.

The shimmering `Inlet Bay' is a frequently graceful space-music drift, `Outer Banks' a droning sound-collage of alien intrigue and stormy ambience, the gentle cooing synths alongside low-key Mellotron choirs of `Pier to Faraway Places' are delicate and reflective with an aching longing, and `Surf' is a restless Berlin School thriller of bubbling synths and shades of Tangerine Dream's classic `Phaedra'. Twenty-minute title track `The Lighthouse' is languidly hallucinogenic and completely enveloping, a fog of precious chimes, skittering fizzes and groaning Mellotron choirs that stretch on into infinity, and when it becomes fraught with little ghostly haunting touches and traces of a lethargic unease, it proves to be a masterclass in subtly increasing drama and growing unrest.

Challenging but not impenetrable, measured but never aimless, `Lighthouse' blurs multiple electronic styles into a kaleidoscope of aural delights that delivers endless moments of supreme beauty, deep contemplative immersion and even fascinating disquiet, and Hertz and Fiesel have delivered a stunning and unpredictably trippy ambient work of mind-bending prog-electronic beauty.

Four stars.

`For a Snowflake' makes for an intangible, gargling and bubbling electronic opener. `Klick und Kluck' offers skittering looping programming over gentle ambient synth washes, `Walking in the Shade of Giants' is a drowsy electronic trickle laced with chiming unease, and `4 Fat Guys in a VW Bug' is a rough jangle of Heldon-like scuzzy and serrated electronic manipulation. The dreamy electronics of `Run Aground' take a calmer meditative hold, and the relentless `Stranger on Second Thought' pulses with a near industrial-like imposing machine coldness looming over fizzy colourful eruptions.

The menacing `A Box of Marbles' reverberates with gurgling electronic bleedings as flighty shuffling slivers blissfully rise around to bring light, and the Harmonia-like `Scavenging for Trouble' is wistful and life-affirming with its shimmering cooing caresses. Reflective and achingly beautiful, `Every Tuesday Morning' opens as a submerged crystalline ambient drone that lifts to life with slinking pulsing programming and light symphonic Mellotron-flecked touches carefully infiltrating, and `No More Clouds' closes with twitching n' glitching machine tantrums over an unceasing pattering of low-key stalking beats that almost flirt with dance/trance touches.

Get into the guts of the album and it takes a very disorientating, mesmerizing hold with its mix of edgier trippy dazes, kaleidoscopic dreamscape atmospheres and embracing ambiance. It proves to be a seductive and colourful Krautrock-modelled prog-electronic work, so let's hope for more team-ups between Fiesel and Hertz in the near future, especially in regards to this new m00m project, as there's so many vibrant ideas emerging and already on display on this hypnotic debut.

Four stars.

Looking at some of the highlights, opener `Fragrant Perfume of Pleasant Memories' is a subtle collage of treated percussion, hazy acoustic guitars, drowsy electronic washes and slinking bass, with traces of unease creeping around the edges of an otherwise heady chill-out. Restless and glitching electronics seep over raga-like dustiness throughout `Nyami Nyami Swells the Zambezi', `As if There is No Afterlife' is frequently a sauntering psychedelic bass rumination, and the ten-plus minute `On Being Ancient, a Faculty for Surviving Disorder' is a dreamlike ambient drift of ebbing synth drones.

`Arabesque Forms in Pale Blue and Browns' almost lurches with restrained trip-hop grooves, and `Lost to the Ignorance of Progress' embraces those unhurried and carefully unfurling electronic atmospheres of the early Klaus Schulze albums like `Picture Music' and twists it with a languid jazzy waft. The fifteen minute `History, a Computer Stored in Tomorrow' starts as a surreal Steve Roach-like ambient drone of ringing crystalline slivers that turns enveloping and oddly embracing as fizzing synth caresses and lightly pattering percussive tribal beats circle the piece, but ultimately it distorts into schizophrenic twitching oblivion in the climax. Bleeding electronic pools permeate the hallucinogenic `Charred n' Pulsed', and the closing title track `The Last Song of a Dying Tribe' is skittering and frantic.

Listeners unfamiliar with Jack's work should probably investigate something like his more obviously melodic space music/Berlin School-modelled double `Planet Red' from 2016 first, or his gentler collaborations with the recently late Wolfgang Gsell from last year such as `Sleeping Trees on Earth' and `Blue'. But `The Last Songs of a Dying Tribe' is a challenging, varied (maybe even a little maddening!) and eclectic set that is frequently, seductively disorientating and endlessly fascinating.

Four stars.

On the opening nineteen-minute title track `Blue', the pair weave a shimmering crystalline soundscape of undulating electronic caresses, full of lulling ambient rise-and-falls, fuzzy pulses and twitching, unravelling washes with only the faintest of percussive teases flitting in and out, mostly relegated to the final minutes. There's almost a drowsy, more subdued (submerged?!) take on the soloing-heavy approach of Klaus Schulze on his early Seventies works throughout, and some darker twists near the climax, but overall the languid atmospheres take on an blanketing bliss that stretches on for eternity.

`Ripples' is a relatively punchy interlude in comparison between the two near-twenty minute bookending pieces of the disc, where pristine electric piano ruminations ring with mystery around hypnotic electronic fuzziness, and some sparse programmed beats help ground the piece into a more compact arrangement that stops it drifting into pure ambient breezes. Hallucinogenic closer `Tides' invites complete immersion, a slow to unfold spacey sweep of unceasing approaching/retreating liquid caresses that lap around fizzing synth ripples and serene cascading swirls.

It might still be a little too freeform and directionless for some prog-electronic listeners, but the album refuses to grind to a halt by settling into static drones, and is too full of colourful movement to be mistaken for solely airy ambient music. Both Jack Hertz and Wolfgang Gsell are too clever the artists to deliver something so predictable or obvious, and instead they present `Blue' as a lightly psychedelic, completely encompassing and mellow dreamy soundtrack to float away to.

Four stars.

`Zangbeto', traditional voodoo guardians of the night, is a drowsy tribal chant over lurching beats, `Avatar', a graphical representation of a computer user's alter ego or character is unsurprisingly modern slinking electronica, and `Topeng', a dramatic form of Indonesian dance blends twitching looping electronics to bring a gamelan-like hypnotic quality. `Batak' grafts chilled panning beats to shivering Steve Roach-like outreaching ambient pools, the drowsy `Skin-Walker' crosses murky beats with violent electronic slivers, and `Death' is an eerie and subtly consuming machine drone that never becomes completely pitch-black. Low-key acoustic strums pervade the disorientating droning drifts of`Gas' , and `Ngil' is a surreal dark ambient closer full of unease, with ebbing dozy washes lapping around pulsing beats that skitter in and out of the darkly psychedelic atmosphere.

The duo here have crafted a completely fascinating work for the Aural Films label with a cool concept that allowed them to offer a very colourful and eclectic range of interpretations of their source material. `Masks' also sees the artists at a good middle ground, with many pieces reasonably accessible without being vaguely commercial, yet always remaining intelligent and challenging, but nor is it as uncompromising or difficult to get your head around as might have been expected. Open minded electronic fans should definitely look into this diverse collection, and let's hope for more collaborations on this subject between Hertz and Eisenlager in the future, as it seems like they've just scratched the surface here!

Four stars.

Opener `Frozen Wave' is a sustaining and panning machine groan with a howling but not hostile ebb and flow, `Sun Run' perfectly balances ringing crystalline cold with pure ambient touches, and `Coldness' is an unwavering hovering drone similar to the opener. `Polynya' is teeming with life and is a warmer lulling ambient embrace not dissimilar to the gentler early Steve Roach pieces with cooing synth caresses, making it one of the highlights. `The Calving' is a cavernous, rumbling and submerged sound collage, the dream-like `Cravasse' is groaning and piercing with maddening pin-drop trickling machine pulses, soothing ambient washes lap around the crashing rumble of `Thunder Hill', and the completely sublime `Endless Blue' is a softly panning hum of shimmering synth slivers against spacey isolation that almost reminds of Tangerine Dream's defining proto- dark ambient classic `Zeit'.

In many ways, `Antarctica' is an uncompromising and difficult work that many will find too vague, uneventful or just downright cold, especially on the two longer early tracks. It admittedly holds a frequently suffocating, overwhelming mood with only a few softer moments to provide some relief, but it's actually quite a darkly beautiful album if you let it seep in. Newcomers to Jack's music would probably be better off starting with the more accessible `Planet Red' set or even the drowsy`Secret Coves' (both also from 2016), but `Antarctica' is best suited to long-time electronic or dark ambient listeners, or those prog-electronic listeners who don't mind their music on the minimal and experimental side.

Three and a half stars (but seasoned electronic/experimental fans can make this a four).

`Crossing the Horizon' opens with subdued pulsing beats that grow and retreat in stature over reverberating sustaining electric drones and fizzing panning washes, subtle slinking electronica-flavoured grooves emerging subtly throughout. Both `Around the Bend' and `Glimmer on the Tracks' have a flowing Steve Roach-like shimmering aura teeming with mystery, with the latter almost able to pass for a lost Tangerine Dream soundtrack piece, and the lightly danger-laced `Bergen' fuses expansive Berlin School moods with shadowy electronic beats, electric guitar distortion, Mellotron-like choirs and ruminative acoustic guitar flecks that remind of Robert Schroeder's `Harmonic Ascendant' in fleeting moments.

The strident guitar strums weaving in and out of the hovering electronics of `Station' hold a faint bluesy tone (and just listen for that lovely if brief Mellotron passage in the final moments), the psychedelic `Park Sides' is both playful and mysterious with a mellow The Orb-like lurching cool drowsiness to its slowly revealing slithering beats and sequenced trickles that perfect fuses old and new sounds, and the distorted electric guitar strains over wavering overwhelming electronics backed to a constant driving beat of the closing title track `Fast Rails' build to a wild and disorientating finale.

It sounds like it could be completely dull, but the gently hypnotic visuals and the frequently floating music accompaniment work to sublime effect on this Aural Films netlabel release, and this is very far removed from placid slow-moving generic ambience or tired progressive-electronic clichés. Completely removed of the visuals on the DVD, the `Fast Rails' album in itself is a diverse and deeply immersive electronic collection of extended works, but together the two mediums achieve a mesmeric cohesion. It's also not a slight in any way to consider the disc a fascinating and cool background listen, and it turns out to be an unexpectedly lovely musical surprise that can be enjoyed on a number of levels from two intelligent and unpredictable artists.

Four stars out of five.

I had the luck to encounter his work via Bandcamp. They actually set this "Drive" in 2013 in my e-mail's doorsteps. "A suite of tracks composed for listening to while driving and also an ongrowing project". -This is how this project came to be and as Jack Hertz advertises.

"DRIVE" is closer to the U.S.A's West Coast school of electronics than its European counterpart, therefore some of its sounds may remind you of this side of the earth ones yet he has turned these influences to his own course and benefit without no kind of "piracy symptoms" and of course experimentation, as always, is allowed.

This project delivers, most of the times, the kind of music composition which changes or stays in its running time in pursue of its best, or more interesting, melody lines with exceptional creativity and innovation and even if not the best section or track, composition wise speaking, everything is perfect pitch sound engineered.

At some point in the long run the conceptual issue becomes bigger than its musical one ,(i.e. an excess of not that hypnotic nor attractive drum-beats), but ironically, when this happens, it highlights the brighter and more unique parts or tracks of the whole release by contrast and one understands what he is capable of when driven.

So in a few words this release is by no means flawless yet a very good and original ride in the Progressive Electronic highway.

***3.5 PA stars.

P.D.-Jack Hertz's discography is quiet more prolific than as it appears, now, in this PA's archive.

`Secret Coves' reveals itself to be a drowsy and constantly-evolving fluid soundtrack, and while there's no actual melodies or obvious themes, lulling synths create a very hypnotic and disorientating atmosphere instead. Slinking beats lurch in and out of the piece and take on a subtle groove here and there, any light tribal-like elements that appear are distorted into subdued oblivion, and the whole piece is never completely breezy or lightweight, with occasional gently melancholic traces floating in and out of the serene surroundings.

Sometimes comparable in only fleeting moments to Ishq or the occasional psychedelic Steve Roach works, the dreamy and mysterious `Secret Coves' is easy to have on as a background listen, but uneasy little slivers and unexpected sonic detours mean it's anything but a pure easy-listening experience. Those who like their electronic music at its most unhurried, drowsy and mysterious will discover a fascinating and shimmering work here, and it's an intoxicating fusion of nature and electronics.

Three and a half stars, rounded up to four.

Although the first `Missions' disc often holds shorter and more compact pieces, there's still several that branch out beyond the ten-minute mark, but frequent gentle programming and restrained beats anchor these compositions from wandering too far. Of the highlights, the whirring and warm `Space-Time Crystal' serenely floats along with trickling beats and twitching synth ripples, `Burning Star' is a cooler drone with a ticking electronic pulse, `Interstellar Voyager' holds symphonic synth washes over plodding beats, `Planet Red' is mystifying shimmering ambience with an eerie liveliness breaking through, and `Dark Matter' is frequently chill-out ambient with bleeding synth pools melting around alien tribal pattering.

The second `Atmospheres' disc is often darker and more challenging, being completely devoid of beats or rhythmic patterns and taking the set into deeper ambient territory, holding a greater depth than the first disc. Thankfully it avoids becoming vacuous and overly pretty New Age fluff, and its lengthy droning passages never move so far into the uneventful near-stillness of the extreme examples of the sub-genre. Humming synth caresses slowly and softly descend around the listener in `Return to Alpha Syntauri', `Andromeda' (the darkest and most challenging piece on offer here) is a deeply immersive and unhurried ringing and reverberating thrumming drone with the most low-key of rise-and-falls, the cooing and almost playful synth glistenings of the lightly psychedelic and mysterious `Cosmosis' are teeming with life, and the moody `Aquarius' is wide- screen and expansive in approach, with the haunting and enveloping sweeping finale almost calling to mind the early Klaus Schulze worlds, a style that lightly permeates this entire disc.

This somewhat more accessible release presents Jack Hertz at a good half-way-point - intelligent and atmospheric but reigning back on many of the experimental indulgences found on plenty of his other discs for something more frequently melodic and approachable. It's an ideal place to start for newcomers, as well as being a wonderfully crafted space music/Berlin School-flavoured work in its own right (and one that's far more interesting than the billion Tangerine Dream clones out there!). Alone they make for two excellent standalone works, but together you have a contrasting set of varied prog- electronic styles that makes for a very attractive and atmospheric collection of space music.

Four stars.