The Magnetic Reconnection by René van der Wouden

Great stuff as always, René!

.

Thanks Alvaro.

Review:

René van der Wouden - The Magnetic Reconnection
Berliner Schule / cosmic ambient - 61:28 - Netherlands 2024

From a very young age, René was immersed in music. Born in 1972, he learned piano at the age of eight and, eight years later, took up the organ. His attraction to e-music came in 1987, while listening to Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Jan Hammer. This new fascination led him to discover the use of synthesizers and ultimately to participate in live performances, including E-Live in 2005, where he was seen alongside a prestigious synthesizer aficionados have long known: Gert Emmens.

This album is inspired by Klaus Schulze (how curious, isn't it?) and, apparently, a bit of Vangelis from the late seventies. Well, I'll let you judge because personally I don't see the connection, either near or far. Without really innovating (who still does it in this area and in the Berliner Schule style?), René manages to captivate the listener by going beyond the sequential and atmospheric layers.

He creates sounds that sometimes flirt with the soundscape (the intro of "In the Shape of the Heliotail") before a dive into the scintillating Schulzian sequencers). "Geomagnetic Storms" floats like a stellar sailboat during the first minutes before then navigating in the sequential eddies like waves sliding over pebbles carried by the surf. Solar winds smooth the notes that combine with these arpeggiators married to synthesized voices themselves supported by rhythms shaped with surgical precision.

Navigation between two subsonic worlds for this slightly distressing atmospheric trip, a sort of waiting room for an upcoming launch into the unknown ("Subsonic Sense"). Then comes one of the best tracks of the present opus which certainly evokes Tangerine Deam's "Overture" (e.g. "Oedipus Tyrannus"). "Artificial Galaxy", a small cosmic pearl in pure soundscape during the first bars, is draped in Froesian textures shrouded in mellotroniric sounds of stellar beauty.

After some nine minutes, light arpeggiators, accompanied by subliminal synthetic choirs, gently shake the waking dreamer. This ultimately results in a captivating and mesmerizing musical texture, with phrases transcended by long ethereal flights that are even more evident in the interstellar turbulence carried by long pulsating moires ("Interstellar Turbulence"). The eponymous track continues to caress the senses for a while before finally replaying increasingly pronounced rhythms, where a melody is grafted in arpeggios of astral synthetic "voices."

A beautiful release for a very good album that I can only recommend.

Clavius ​​Reticulus (of Prog censor) https://www.progcensor.eu/index.html