The Berlin School of Electronic Music is an institution whose enrollment has been on the rise. Spacemusic has seen its share of artists involved in re-structuring the past from a zone where it's only yesterday forever. But on the streets of today, nostalgia lasts as long as a thought and arists in electronic sound must bring more than just pulsing arpeggios and cascading mechanistic sequences to the music scene.
On Into The Liquid Unknown, Paul Ellis explores new areas of the genre by using his own life and times to re-interpret the familiar doctrine of '70s cosmic music. Common references do surface. Ellis, a remarkably talented synth programmer, gives us the silky smooth pads and authoritative, commanding e-rhythms associated with good spacemusic. The emotional side of the music comes out too, in the album's insightful harmonic selection and progressions. But Ellis is involved in music to make something new every time and the album's sound design and energy come from a different place than that of his peers. So, if not purely as an experiment in sound, why then does this album exist?
Into The Liquid Unknown seems less about streaking through interstellar space, supernatural revelation or reactualizing mythic events than it is about the light of human reason. Ellis looks to music for that which he cannot find in himself. As you listen to any of the pieces on this album, you are in the midst of a thought process as Ellis attempts to bring the order of the cosmos to the chaos of life. Into The Liquid Unknown was created through the intertwining of technology, aesthetic and individual quality. The relationship between Ellis and his music is a complex one and drawn onto disc for us to contemplate that which is held in the mind of the artist.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 7 September 2001
