Reviews

It’s nice to hear again some new stuff from Anosphere. Like the last time, the new album is not bad at all either – maybe even a little better I think.

Sometimes you run into a piece of music that shows potential but lacks something important to be good. I usually don't let mediocre soundquality ruin my listening experience, especially if the music is well composed. But unfortunately with the debut album of Cyber Space odd leveling of sounds and mediocre melodic content prevent me from getting a fully pleasant experience.

Anosphere’s album Field of Mutants gives us a great opportunity to explore some of the best spacesynth music. The cool covers made by Frank M. Lewecke suits the album fantastically – giving a hazy feeling while listening to the album. Eventhough the covers are quite “simple-looking”, the inside is much more.

Thomas Gillert aka Spaceraider entered the spacesynth universe in 2004 with his album 'Journey into Space'. It somewhat suffered from low production quality but made clear Thomas' compositional skills. Thomas has now teamed up with Marek Kolodynski, a DJ living in the USA, who is a co-producer of the album and is for example responsible for the lyrics on vocoder tracks. Space Project's first album 'Beyond Imagination' reminds strongly of Spaceraider 'Journey into Space' sound but takes a leap forward - both musically and technically.

The brilliant album cover made by Kaisu Airaksinen (Mark Vera's younger sister) definitely makes this to an interesting album. Electron has been very generous during the latest time and giving us the chance to download many of their songs for free on the web, therefore we are all familiar with their music and we knew that we could expect high quality music from them this time. The release of this album has been mentioned in the forums for almost a year now and let's go through the album part by part and see if it was worth the long waiting.

So finally the eighth volume of Hypersound's successful Synthesizer Dance collection serie is available. The initial idea with these albums was to give new artists a chance to release their songs on a album before they had enough material for a complete album. This must have changed during the years as half of the songs on this album are made by Gustaf Grefberg and Humphrey Robertson which both have released solo albums during the years. Probably the need for this kind of album is not so big any longer as some of the artists will probably release own albums soon anyhow.

Vocoderion is the first woman composer doing spacesynth and this makes her album, "Biomechanical Structure", unique. This is also one of the last releases by AXIS Records before the company changed name into Alpha Centauri.

Space Travels is promoted as a tribute to the masters of spacesynth so I had a pretty good idea what the album would sound like. Synthesis takes a stab at classic Laserdance style using same tempos, similar sounds and arrangements. Sometimes Synthesis is trying to be even too much like the predecessors because the album suffers from same symptoms as some classic tracks.

It is great to see that the pioneers of spacesynth, Rob and Michiel, are back with the same productivity as they had back in the 80s. This album was available just one year after their previous album Jupiter Beyond was released. Therefore it was interesting to hear if also this album would bring some fresh ideas to the genre.

The album cover and the name Xain gives the album a quite anonymous impression, but don't let the cover mislead you. If the cover would have been made by a real artist and if the name of the musician would have been Lizardking, or Gustaf Grefberg, then I'm sure that the album would have given a more interesting impression. People that have followed Gustaf Grefberg's contribution to Hypersound's Synthesizer Dance serie knows what we could expect from this album.

When this album was released I felt that I didn't need to hear the soundsample at Hypersound's website before I bought the album, as these musicians have only been released good music on their previous albums. My expectation of this album was quite high, and when I saw the impressive album cover my expectation went even higher...