“E-Day 2010 is yet another great way to learn about the different styles of EM”
1 Gaia (David Wright & Friends) 9:11
2 Cern (Erik Seifert) 12:00
3 Asturiana (E.R.G.) 2:42
4 Day of E (Free System Projekt) 24:29
5 Eden to Chaos (The Corrupted Time Mix) (Code Indigo) 11:44
(CD 60:09) (V.F.)
(Progressive EM, Ambient)
The E-DAY 2010 took place on May 22nd. And as usual the label Groove nl produced a CD with unreleased tracks composed by the artists invited to this intimate festival held annually in the city of Oirschot in the Netherlands. This year, the festival hosted some of the biggest names in contemporary electronic music (EM) with David Wright, Erik Seifert and Free System Projekt. And a newcomer, E.R.G., completed this line-up of musicians for this 5th edition of the E-Day festival. Once again, the organizers Kees Aerts and Ron Boots knew how to combine a contemporary, even progressive, EM with a music closer to the roots of the Berlin School while touching the harmonies and melodies that know how to capture the attention of a crowd already conquered but not fooled by any product.
Supported by his long-time friends Andy Lobban, Niel Fellowes and Nigel Turner-Heffer, David Wright offers us a track that perfectly depicts his very poetic and harmonious musical universe. A superb melody that oscillates between the worlds of Moody Blues and Pink Floyd, the meeting point of Code Indigo, Gaia awakens with fine hesitant pulsations that embrace delicate percussions. A tribal flavored intro covered with chords of an acoustic guitar that strums its strings between musical prisms and nice mellotron violins, glowing the most beautiful melodic approaches of Moody Blues. On this delicate rhythm, Gaia adorns itself with its most beautiful musical assets with notes of a melancholic piano and a harmonious keyboard, before the electric guitar casts a veil of romance. It's a beautiful ballad more progressive than electronic tinged with a maudlin romanticism with these synthesized violins that carry the music beyond the doors of the dream and its fantasies. Cern introduces us to the sibylline universe of Erik Seifert, where melody and harmonies rub shoulders with the musical strangeness of the German synthesist. The intro is dark and gloomy with spectral winds blowing along the walls of a cave buried in an oceanic universe. A mysterious voice, barely audible, pierces an aquatic veil filled with sinuous reverberating waves from which hesitant scintillating arpeggios escape. Arpeggios which jump and subdivide to dance on an anamorphic structure with these reverberations which undulate on scattered percussions. Slowly a spasmodic rhythm settles in with more nourished percussions and keyboard chords with hybrid tones. They ride and flicker nervously in a heavy musical corridor divided between two rhythmic approaches and shot through with heavy twisted reverberations. E.R.G.'s Asturiana is an all-too-short track with an acoustic guitar courting a theremin-wave synth. It's a beautiful, but curious I must say, spectral ode that instantly hooks the emotions.
With Day of E from FSP, we enter the wonder of the Berlin School musical subtleties. A long track of almost 25 minutes that starts with all the charm of the overtaking, by improvisation, in the universe of EM. Sonorous ebullitions simmer and form a strange hypnotic pulsation that fizzes under the waves of an old corrosive synth. Monks' voices clear the abyss, immersing us with a melancholic memory of old Klaus Schulze from the Irrlicht or Cyborg era, while a soft dreamy flute leads us into the reveries of Tangerine Dream. A slow morphic intro that takes a dark corridor with sinuous breaths around the 10th minute, the starting point of a good cadence instituted by a sequencer with frenetic undulating chords. Although soft, the rhythm subtly modifies its structure while keeping its hypnotic constancy like a train crisscrossing a sequenced road covered with a synth that mixes its fluty and violin lines. This is a good old Berlin School, typical to the vintage style of Free System Projekt, Day of E has all the necessary ingredients to please the fans of Tangerine Dream from this era. Eden to Chaos (Corrupted Time Mix) closes this CD with an approach closer to the big progressive rock than EM, a little bit like Gaia but with much more fury. It's in every way in accordance with the electronic progressive rock approach of Code Indigo. A track that combines all the finesse and romance of David Wright, while exploring a more powerful, even violent tangent, Eden to Chaos starts with a soft atmospheric intro where the piano throws its melancholy on a latent rhythm that grows slowly, like a train looking for a cruising speed. Ambivalent and unceasingly caught up by the notes of nostalgic piano, the rhythm is in constant change embracing more weighted passages and plunging into heavier and more powerful structures. Like we can hear on a good progressive electronic rock.
From progressive electronic rock to good old Berlin School and from rich atmospherical elements to a more contemporary tone, E-DAY 2010 is a great way to learn about the different styles of EM. There is something for everyone in this compilation from Groove nl which, year after year does everything to promote the beauties of a music that has no boundaries but the limits of our imagination. A nice album, well balanced and well structured that is beyond the standards in terms of album gathering various artists.
Sylvain Lupari (February 28th, 2011) ***½**
Available at Groove nl
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