Wow – when we heard this for the first time we couldn’t quite believe it – This really is different, different for Jarre, or indeed different for any ‘Synth’ musician! ‘Sessions 2000’ is great - Absolutely brilliant if fact, but it introduces a totally new approach to making ‘Electronic Music’ that we found totally fascinating. A more wholly relaxed forty-three minutes of full-sounding cosmic ambience with a slight jazz tinge would be hard to find. Its feel is so chilled and relaxed, you’ll maybe find it hard to believe it’s Jarre, but that said, it has to be his best (and most different) album in ages, of maybe even the best album that Pete Namlook didn’t make!

146186
Weight: 150.00 g

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Those who are aware of Gandalf’s blend of fantasy electronic music and rock should sit up and take notice of the music of Kayanis. When you listen to this stuff, you get an overwhelming sense of listening to something so moving, so spectacular, so epic and so incredibly well crafted, that its almost mind-blowing. The choirs, the astounding guitar work and the huge, huge rhythms are carved into a musical rock face that is gigantic, with a beautifully delivered sense of dynamics that produces passages of immense might one minute and delicate keyboard-led, effects-fed beauty the next, then raging head on into yet another storm force slice of majestic power, as guitars, strings, drums and epic overtures, all mingle to create passages that will leave you in absolute awe of what you are hearing. The production is vast and powerful, and the compositional, playing and musical skills are outstanding. This is what we would describe as music of truly epic proportions - The sort of powerful music that evokes cinematic images of vast armies on the march, and then gathering together on a dark and stormy night to wait for battle to commence at dawn. The more you hear this music, the better it gets – It’s the kind of album that will live on and on in your collection, sounding just as good in ten years time as it does today – special, spectacular and stunning

959439
Weight: 150.00 g

The more I play this, the better it gets, and it was phenomenal to start with! The first two tracks alone feature some of the most amazing instrumental music that you’ll have heard in a long, long while – This is music that is so much like Mike Oldfield and so powerful, that you get the impression the musicians were unafraid to throw in the kitchen sink when they were recording it! Just listen to this… It’s all in there… Full-blown choirs, swathes of electronics, piano that sounds like its being played with lead-lined gloves, strings, thunderous drum rhythms and searing electric guitars – It’s something very special indeed, that for all of the world, should actually be where Mike Oldfield is at right now! The four-minute title track is second in the running order, and it’s one of those pieces that seems to pass in a flash, yet is so good you just have to keep playing it again and again and again – and that’s before you’ve found that everything that follows also lives up to the dizzy heights of this stunning piece of music – THIS ALBUM REALLY IS THAT HOT!!! It’s a sort of mix of Mike Oldfield, Mark Shreeve, Moodswings and Stravinsky, with so much of it having the feel and sound of some kind of grand soundtrack. There is a similarity to the music of Gandalf too, in that it’s the same kind of melodic multi-instrumental, fantasy album that he produces and it is equally as timeless too.

907528
Weight: 150.00 g

If it’s tunes and rhythms that are your thing, then you will be over the moon with this CD, because it has 11 tracks crammed full of them! – It’s almost foot-tapping stuff - Your ultimate example of brilliantly produced instrumental music that is largely founded on a full-sounding bed of sequencers, keyboards and electro-percussive rhythms. The multi-dimensional keyboard/guitar-based music Bjorn Lynne makes usually lies somewhere between the worlds of classic period instrumental Genesis and modern Tangerine Dream, but this CD is much closer to the latter. It is an album of ‘playing’ rather than ‘sampling’ where the musician powers up his full armoury of instruments to perform a set of mighty musical landscapes filled with melodic energy and powerful dynamics that fans of the old I.C. label stuff, classic Jean Michel Jarre, Peru and some Rainbow Serpent titles will have a field day with. There’s much in the way of spiralling synth intros and scorching solos and lush melodic keyboard orchestrations that break into rhythmic percussion driven pulsating pieces too, as well as occasional passages of grandiose guitar fronted symphonic rock and mellowed-out dream-like landscapes to take in. Overall, ‘Colony’ is sixty-seven minutes of varied and tuneful music that should be easily accessible to a very wide-ranging listening audience.

940300
Weight: 150.00 g

From Russia, a simply fabulous CD of ‘real’ space music, featuring 2 lengthy pieces and 3 shorter tracks, and all are absolutely superb. Played and produced in a top quality manner, the musician sets the scene perfectly by moving straight into the two epics, the first of which starts with a very full-sounding lead keyboard flow, with assorted synth layers and drones gliding below, while on top the tones change from high register to bottom-end as all the various layers intertwine. The composition constantly moves, with the subtlest of bass sequencer-style lines running underneath as lead synth lines fly and soar above in cosmic splendour. Throughout the rest of this track, the main, lone lead lines are kept simple and uncluttered. The sparse soundscape conveys a feel of vast, deep space, but more the unknown rather than the familiar after the halfway point, where it becomes quite eerie and continues the ever-darkening mood, as more sounds gather to convey the feel of the stark and the surreal. The second of the long tracks follows and clocks in at nineteen minutes. This is another fantastic celestial voyage into the realms of space music, where a variety of cascading, tinkling synth rhythms form a light canvas for the main body of sonic colours to spread them selves over. The piece slowly drifts and glides, seemingly hanging motionless in the gloom at several points, but once again, it’s another classic slice of stripped-down cosmic music, but, in this particular case, one that will have you absolutely captivated for the duration. As before, the mood remains dark, combining the ethereal with the always-present human touch. After this, the shorter tracks appear, the first with a stuttering sequencer line underpinning a most gorgeous and again, simple, lead melody line - A neat idea that works a treat. The next is a three-minute piece that starts with waves of full-sounding, dark soundscapes, beginning a travelogue that sees a variety of electronic sounds coming out over a deep bass synth undercurrent. Finally, you get fuller-sounding cosmic track that emulates one of the epics in many ways, closing the album with four minutes of shimmering stark space synth textures. A fine debut album!

914911
Weight: 150.00 g

This is excellent – Surely one of the top European synth acts of the new millennium? And what a way to start the album - The title track lasts a shade under twenty-four minutes, and during the first four minutes of the piece you will hear definite references to mid-70’s era Tangerine Dream at work. So, you get the drift? – Then, a surprise - the track goes into very dark cosmic territories for a while, before a lead synth comes shining up over the horizon like the arrival of the morning sun, and the piece begins to build, slowly and assuredly as the new backdrop brings promises of brighter things to come. Eventually, a sequencer line comes on strong at the ten minute mark, and the track starts to settle into the earlier promise of sounding identical to classic mid-70’s Tangerine Dream, and that is something it proceeds to do to perfection, right down to the trademark TD flute-like Mellotron leads. The synthesizer and sequencer sounds constantly increase in strength, and while they in no way lose sight of their attempt to recreate the feel and sound of the 70’s, they do make a modern, solid, flowing, dramatic, full-sounding and enjoyable noise that ends up being one of these pieces of semi-retro music that you will play and play and play again! For once, these are retro sounds like it should be done, the blindfold test making it virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, and that’s no bad thing. The rest of this superb CD has 70’s Tangerine Dream and Edgar Froese stamped all over it, and yet it comes out as refreshing, alive and solidly enjoyable variant on the theme, thanks largely to the arrangement skills that the group possess that makes the music sound both familiar yet original. As retro ‘Berlin School’ music goes, this has to be one of the small band of names that have reached the top of the tree, and as such, comes recommended by all at CDS - which means it MUST be good!

860680
Weight: 150.00 g

Wow – the 7^th album if I’m correct, and it’s amazing – there’s no other word for it! Well, there are, actually, but how many superlatives do you want in one review! The main thing you need to know is that it’s a 5-tracker, of which the last is well over forty minutes long, and is one of the finest slices of genuine trio-performed, space-improvised-synth music since the heady days of early-mid 70’s Tangerine Dream. However, this band doesn’t actually sound like Tangerine Dream, well, at least not much anyway, they just have that same pioneering spirit and sense of adventure that the German pioneering trio had. Their production skills are perfect too, as this album, and the others before it illustrate quite clearly. It is incredible music from a trio of musicians that aren’t encumbered by the ghosts of the past, yet they still hold those past musicians with reverence all the same, and the musical results they produce are stunning by anyone’s standards. Oranj Climax is a group I just never tire of hearing – For me, they started out as brilliant, and have steadily improved on that ever since!

946485
Weight: 150.00 g

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Now there's a name from the distant past that I never thought I would hear from again! Wrong - about 15 years after we first promoted his music, and had him play ‘live’ at one of the UK Electronica festivals, here he is, back again with what is his first CD! Way back, this was the proud musician/composer of an excellent cassette called ‘Prismatic’, and he followed that up with several other cassette releases that never quite seemed to fulfil the promise of that debut tape. Now, after all these years, you can just imagine my surprise when this CD arrived on my desk, and not only that, I also find that it is by far and away the best thing I've ever heard him do, and it’s actually a lot better than much of what many of his younger contemporaries are getting up to in Europe right now. This is an album that I've enjoyed immensely, so much so much that I've actually made time to give it several plays just for pleasure! It has 5 tracks of melodic, rhythmic multi-textured, multi-layered synth music that span fifty-three minutes, and it’s a thoroughly enjoyable album with an undoubted 80’s influence, and yet it still sounds fresh and vital.

888076
Weight: 150.00 g

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