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Space needs explorers, and with their album Five Suns, Free System Projekt is back leading the way! The duo of Marcel Engels and Ruud Heij return from a years long hiatus, to make their way through five galaxy opening electronic experiences across a two CD album set. In its own way, Five Suns moves perfectly. Guided by some central and unyielding design and energy, the music dominates our internal landscape - crowding out other thoughts, blocking our view of life on Earth. Supernaturally charged, the music's engine pulse seems to slide, to move and surge in the lean precision of a motor throbbing with a quiet and reduced power. Five Suns drifts smoothly through the great chambers of night. Admittedly susceptible to the sensory aspects of sound, Engels and Heij deploy massive Mellotron strings and choirs, yet leave room for an undercurrent of delicate flutes and soft synths. As melodies writhe here and seem motionless there, this work manages to ignore the immutable voice of time. In a magical motion of infinitely complex, echoing notes, we encounter a strange machine beauty. Yet, within zones of atonality, we find an intentional imagination taking place. Conjuring isolated open spaces, activating different parts of the brain, these chilling spaces seek to be explained - or else haunt us later in dreams. Understanding that something singular can spark multiple variations, that sound can always be re-worked, revised and re-crafted, Free System Projekt pursues and modifies key themes across generations - to remain connected to their Electronic ancestors. Innovative musicians are rightly thought of as out on the frontier. Free System Projekt, and others of their standing, are further away - in a place where mastery of music is found, not through virtuosity, but through spiritual means.
- Chuck van Zyl 11 May 2017 |
