“Unusual but fascinating, 3 Briques is a good and very versatile album which shows before all ,all of MB's talent to create things out of nothing!”
1 La Brique Bleue 32:19 2 La Brique Verte 8:44 3 La Brique Noire 36:14 SynGate CD-R MB04
(CD-r/DDL 77:19) (V.F.) (Electronica, ambient and experimental)
Unusual! And it's not because it is that it's not fascinating. We have to think of the music of Tangerine Dream, period Zeit, or still Conrad Schnitzler and the experimental passages of Ian Boddy to notice that this kind of music always attracts the curiosity of those who likes hearing something else. If for some of you Michael Brückner seems to be a new name in the field of EM, it’s quite the opposite because this talented synthesist produces EM since moons. In fact, well before his One Hundred Million Miles Under the Stars, which was released in 2012, the German musician had dozens of music chapters which often exploited the abstruse character of the music and its forms. 3 BRIQUES is an unusual album where the music and its experiments overshadow the harmonies and those short structures of rhythm which rock between cosmic music and Électronica. The genesis of this album goes back to last March while Michael Brückner had an idea more technical than musical that he created with a series of small musical segments among which each was a mutation of the present one. Little by little La Brique Bleue took shape. By gathering all these bits and pieces he noticed that a certain musicality was perceptible. He thus added fragments of melodies and rhythms as well as effects and another parallel line to the rhythm. He posted this experimental project on the Mixcloud platform. Kilian Schloemp, the big boss of SynGate Records, found the whole thing very interesting and asked Michael if he could make an album out of it.
La Brique Bleue is the most musical part of the album. Its first 15 minutes exploit a very good mixture between its spheroidal phases and some fragments of down-tempo and of Chill moods with effects which feed from the glaucous and futuristic synth layers of Vangelis and with sequences haloed of organic tones which are very close of Michael Brückner's repertoire. The effects come from a cosmic vision that we all know, and the voices seem to go out of a television screen. The structure of rhythm seems to shade its momentum with softer or ethereal passages, sometimes times livelier, while the sequences of rhythms always feed these stroboscopic lines where there are missing mordant fangs. Charmingly ambient, almost celestial, passages give munitions to a structure which exploits marvellously the charms of the minimalist art and the synth scatters to satiety some smooth cosmic waves as well as good solos. The 15th minute brings an ambiospheric passage of 4 minutes before the rhythm returns in a more eager envelope which reminds me of Steve Roach when he decides to drive madly his sequencer. It’s very good and that sounds as a very well tied up title.
During an exchange of texts with Michael, he explained to me that La Brique Verte is an ambient passage between both monuments of sounds, and rhythms and melodies of 3 BRIQUES. It’s very ambiospherical with a thick cloud of synth lines which agglutinate in an immense wall of sounds. With La Brique Noire we enter into the pure unusual. When Kilian Schloemp asked Michael if it was possible to make an album from the elements of La Brique Bleue, the German synth magus had only 30 minutes of music written. He remembered then that he had several music bits and pieces which were dragging somewhere, and which were dated of the early 2000. It’s from these bases that La Brique Noire was composed. The beginning is charming with this line of sequences which returns constantly and whose recollections go as far as the Wuivend Riet album from Johannes Schmoelling. Three minutes farther, the movement of sequences and the whistling synth are fading out in the first moments of deep atmospheres which dominate the 37 minutes of La Brique Noire. Between these 2 phases which are exchanging these 37 minutes on 5 occasions, Michael Brückner adds a veil of intensity which is steadier on the rhythms of which the presences don't even reach a total of 10 minutes in all. The remainder is an immense mosaic of atmospheres, voices and effects which reaches its peak towards the border of the 25 minutes and up until the finale.
Unusual but fascinating! Michael Brückner is quite a phenomenon who likes going out of this commercial zone to experiment a music where hides constantly some moments of pure delight. If we hook rather easily on La Brique Bleue, La Brique Verte is a good moment of intense elements of ambient music, La Brique Noire tests our capacity to get out of our comfort zone. It’s these passages of sequences of rhythm that will get us hooked. And in all and all, 3 BRIQUES is a good and very versatile album which demonstrates before all Michael Brückner's talent to create things out of nothing!
Sylvain Lupari (November 12th, 2016) ***½**
Available at SynGate Records Bandcamp
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