| Artist: Gert Emmens + Ruud Heij Album: Blind Watchers of a Vanishing Night Released: 19 September 2005 | 
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Gert Emmens + Ruud Heij create evocative soundtracks, not for the cinema, but for the images appearing in the back of the listener's mind. Their imaginative scoring and rapturous intensity evokes limitless space. Their second collaboration, Blind Watchers of a Vanishing Night (61'51") contains three studio and two live tracks. The centerpiece, the live recording "A Journey Through Time" (44'02"), is a massive six part trek along a strange, spiraling path through a reiterative and intensely ambiguous electronic landscape. The music wanders and flows, while simultaneously vaporous and unified. The piece tracks a line from light to dark, external to internal. Emmens + Heij utilize great dynamic range variations as a tool to create a deeper spatial dimension and psychological impact. At the core of their realizations are intricately constructed and layered sequencer patterns. The seductive syncopating rhythms bounce and echo, brighten and darken as the work's energy level heats and cools. These machine-like revolutions are softened by the constant shifting motion of synth string pads and soaring mellotron flute melodies. This and their other works travel from rhythmically interlocked intensity to slow motion harmonic complexity. Moving from a dreamlike stillness, to fierce brilliance, Emmens + Heij are locating new paths and branches of spacemusic.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 12 October 2005 | |