How many ingenious synth people must we have, people, really? The answer to my not-rhetorical question is this: at least one more. There’s room for the Black Unicorn, even if there wasn’t on old Noah’s boat. So alongside works by Bastian Void, Panabrite, Andreas Brandal, Guenter Schlienz and others Traced Landscapes shall get its own little typed card in the catalog of my mental musical-weirdo library, providing a compelling chapter to history’s Big Book of Modified Electronics. Both A and B are split with short, eye-crossing scrambles of scribbling tones somewhere on the middle, and on either side of those, Curt Brown (as friends and familiars call him otherwise) pitches rolling planes of tone that stretch deep into sub-space. Sometimes there’s softly throbbing motorik synth loops that balance themselves like a spinning gyroscope, and sometimes seismic waves of sounds gently breathe an icy breath into the tape’s majestic life force. It’s pretty and twinkling and expansive and cosmic and celestial — all those things that make the great synthesists great these days while retaining its own unique stamp on things that should give it a calling card of sorts for future releases (as all the great ones have). Here’s hoping and looking forward to what becomes of the mythical beast and its beatific beauty.
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