DRAGONS OF PERN

Dragons of Pern shows Phrozenlight still slowly progressing, getting slightly better with each release. This album isn't really much different from Creation in style, but Dragons of Pern is darker. There is definitely a spacier feel on this album, featuring dark emptiness and and metallic resonances that sound like magnetic waves from planets bouncing from asteroids. The thick, grey drones that lie behind each of these tracks are surprisingly effective compared to the last album. The main problem that I had with Creation and Moon were that the tracks were very long but didn't progress or evolve at all - that's changed here. These sonic hallways of mass blackness slowly progress through different shades of cosmic dark-matter. The whole album is much fuller in sound, and it really doesn't leave me wanting more at all.

This is a very good release from Phrozenlight, and I'm glad I stuck through the bad albums to get to this one. Fans of Peter M., Lumina Magica, or WMRI should definitely check out this album.

Phrozenlight is an artist that must be taken in small doses. After his quite good debut very reminding to Tangerine Dream I have got very bored by the following two albums, in particular "Moon" so I decided to give up to him.

Looking for some ambient music I decided to give him another try and even if this "Dragons of Pern" is not too dissimilar from "Moon", there's something more inside.

It's just electronics with no rhythm, nothing that can be called "structure" and of course nothing with the sembiance of a melody, just space music. But the space is more interesting than the dead "Moon". The album title is inspired to a fantasy novel of Anne McCaffrey, that's part of a cycle (the cycle of Pern) and this probably makes the difference.

As well as I like closing my eyes and let my mind create mental images by following the music, I think that who makes this kind of music does something similar, putting into his work the sensations brought by the mental images coming in this case from the novel. So I can hear a big difference between "Dragon's Cave" and "Dragon's Fight Against Thread", as the second is surely more dramatic and full of "sensations".

It's true that if one jumps randomly from one part to the other it can appear to be all the same, but this is a kind of music who requires attention, something that has to be listened to with headphones.

This album is very close to the TD of the pink period, from which Phrozenlight admits taking inspiration and at least this time he has partially succeeded.

Having mentioned the first two tracks, let's say that "Dragon's Going Between" is different in some way from the other two tracks. The sounds are different: more squared waves and the thing most similar to a major chord that I have listened from this Dutch artist up to now.

Not a disk for everybody. It's pure space electronic ambient, but in its genre I think it deserves 3 stars.