“Places is a dance music album with a more experimental approach wrapped in the ambient sweetness of the Berliner style EM”
ONE 1 Scale Me, 2 Detachment, 4 The Lectrice, 5 Four Maybe, 6 Magnet Sea, 7 The Line,8 Outside, 9 (Untitled)
TWO
10 2 Lines, 11 Lost Code, 12 Asphalt and The Sea, 13 The Cat Comes in, 14 Night Shop,15 Lights to Go, 16 The Other Home, 17 Your Hotel, 18 40 Minutes Bonus Tracks 19 (Untitled 1), 20 (Untitled 2), 21 (Untitled 3)
Wrotycz Records | WROTYCZ 29 (CD 72:43) (V.F.)
(EDM, IDM & Electronica)
Another artist from the Wrotycz Records label, Llovespell is a name associated with EM since his association with Hans Johm in the project Radio Eichenlaub in the early 2000's. Tinged of melancholy, the music of the German duo was then guided by the Dark Ambient style. Llovespell, a project by Stephan Spreer, left Radio Eichenlaub in 2002 to pursue a solo career. He then turned to a more dance genre but also more experimental with a slight link with an industrial ambience. Some 6 CDs and 2 cassettes later, Wrotycz Records offers us the last two tapes of Llovespell. We are talking here about 21 titles and an impressive musical mosaic with various genres which get intersect in a good frenzy EDM. Limited to 500 pressing edition, PLACE is a first rendezvous which features 2, and even 3, facets of Stephan Spreer.
Scale Me sets the tone with a lively and bouncy rhythm. It's a good and catchy EDM track decorated with good effects of percussion and of boorish voices gurgling among ghostly ululations. Adorned of sonic glitches and other psybient effects, Detachment goes for a good bipolar down-tempo. Here again, the percussions add to the charms whereas foggy synth pads explain the presence of this album on the Wrotycz Records label. Echo Run is more commercial with its fluid rhythm embellished with Afro-Caribbean xylophone percussion. Docile, The Lectrice reminds me of the good commercial hit from Altered Image. Four Maybe is more rough in its psychedelic-ambient industrial dance approach. The sound effects, and they are manifold, envelop a rhythm which leaps barely. More fluid, Magnet Sea surfs on synth waves in a rather ethereal EDM structure, while The Line joins a little the style of Scale Me. Outside does into an ambient dance genre with a nice sound texture where the synth and its circular sweeping dominates on a sonic flora teeming with its tones still as much sought after since that Scale Me has infiltrated between our ears. This first cassette, entitled One, to nest in PLACES ends with the 39 seconds of (Untitled) which presents a fauna of percussive elements and big effects of white noises in a structure without direction. With a good balance between dance music and percussion effects which attracts the curiosity of the ears, one tames One pretty well. On the other hand, Two proposes structures as rough as Four Maybe. The music is more into an experimental dance with a texture of modern psychedelic sounds and effects which roar much more than the rhythms. It requires a couple of plays, although a title like Asphalt and The Sea can make things easier. A 3rd E.P. was under construction, but it never saw the light of day. Llovespell has recovered titles entitled simply (Untitled). We still feel a sense of evolution in the approach of Stephan Spreer who favors a texture more Jazz on (Untitled 1) and (Untitled 2), whereas (Untitled 3) adopts a fascinating approach a la Zoolook, but in a more acoustic version. Pretty interesting!
One'll have guessed it; PLACES is a dance music album with a more experimental approach wrapped in the ambient sweetness of the Berliner style EM. The style of Llovespell offers a more ethereal psybient despite a superabundance, very seductive by the way, of much aesthetic sound effects since it's little used in the usual genre. It's a nice discovery which flows very well between the ears, at least mine's, and is available in Digipack format with 4 side panels. An album whcih should appeal to fans of EDM with a more experimental approach.
Sylvain Lupari (July 25th, 2018) ***¾** SynthSequences.com Available on Wrotycz Records
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