Bee Mask

Chris Madak, aka Bee Mask, was responsible for one of last year's best electronic albums, the wonderfully varied affair that was "Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico". Madak mixes analogue and digital sounds to stunning effect in a way that clearly sets him apart from much of the neo-kosmische scene, and puts him somewhere between that genre and noisy electroacoustic sound experiments. Last year also saw the release of his retrospective double-LP "Elegy For Beach Friday".

The last couple of months have seen him return with not one but two new albums, albeit quite short ones as far as playing time goes. But what they lack in that department they make up for in quality and scope of vision.

The latest one, released on digital this week, is his return to John Elliot's Spectrum Spools. "When We Were Eating Unripe Pears" feels like the follow up proper to "Canzoni". It has that same ability to drift seamlessly from almost pure noise to blissful kosmische without any apparent effort. The sound world Madak paints is captivating. There is a nostalgic streak to the proceedings, but never merely for the sake of it. But I also find it hard to imagine a more contemporary sounding record. It's this duality that make it such an interesting and compelling listen. A worthy follow up to "Canzoni", indeed.

Read full review of When We Were Eating Unripe Pears - Bee Mask on Boomkat.com ©

Last month Bee Mask also released an LP on the label Room40 called "Vaporware/Scanops". It contains two sidelong tracks of roughly fifteen minutes each. This is a more toned down album than "Unripe Pears" and the kosmische leanings are much more apparent here. The general feel is not far removed from what Klaus Schulze managed to achieve in his heyday with albums such as "Timewind" and "Moondawn". Instead of quickly switching between different moods, that Madak does so well on "Canzoni" and "Unripe Pears", here he let's the sequences slowly develop over the whole tracks, and it makes for a thoroughly entrancing listen. Maybe not the most groundbreaking of his work, but an essential entry in his oeuvre never the less. Together with "Unripe Pears" this has convinced me that Bee Mask surely is one of the most interesting acts of the current synthwave/neo-kosmische/experimental electronic scene. Bee Mask manages to combine well crafted composition and cutting edge sound design in a way few manages to match.

Read full review of Vaporware / Scanops - Bee Mask on Boomkat.com ©

Space Wars, Vol. 1

Yesterday I released my latest album as AB Lundberg on bandcamp. It's a quite short thing of around 30 minutes of neo-kosmische arpeggios and pads in a soundtrack to an imaginary and slightly hazy, downbeat scifi movie. Not so much a Lucasian affair of blasting laser canons and giant space stations, more the extra terrestrial equivalent of a sunday afternoon with cream tea at some long abandoned sea side resort. Not like that place were Moz wished for the nuclear bombs to come, in this place it has already gone off, and nobody could care less. It's a place populated by all those old 70's and 80's post apocalyptic cliches, where the heroes of my youth's role playing games meet up with my childhood's futuristic toys and take on the evil empire of mainstream scifi blockbusters.

Vol. 1? Yes, it's part of a longer form idea. There's already stuff recorded for Vol. 2 but how it will turn out I have no idea. Didn't really know there was to be a Vol. 1 to begin with, but these 10 tracks just seemed to represent some kind of unity so here they are.

Vangelis at work in 1983

A Japanese look at Vangelis' work on the soundtrack for Antarctica in 1983. Will also try wearing sun glasses in the studio.

Ozzy vs. the ARP 2600

Apparently Ozzy Osborne had an ARP 2600 tucked away somewhere since the 70's as this clip from The Osbornes show. Wether he once knew how to play and program it (and the knowledge has went the same way as so much in that man's head) or he's always been as ignorant of it's functions as when he rediscovers it, we don't know. Lovely interaction between man and machine. Would love to see a similar video of how Ralf Hutter treats his machines ...

ARP 2500 and TR-808

A nice jam with an ARP 2500 an a Roland TR-808 by David Morley, dug up on Youtube. Pretty expensive gear for this kind of audio quality, though.

Suzanne Ciani - Seven Waves

The re-issue of Suzanne Ciani's debut album proper "Seven Waves" is out today on digital. It has been available for a while on iTunes in it's original 1982 glory, but this is the 30th anniversary edition released by Finders Keepers on vinyl. The cd version is coming any day now and as on the cd, the digital includes Ciani's entire 1970 private press album "Voices of Packaged Souls" (released as vinyl reissue earlier this year) as a bonus feature.

The combination of those two albums make for a pretty strange pairing. It could be seen as the framework of the tracks released on the "Lixivation" compilation this spring. The no compromise electronic experimentation on "Packaged Souls" and the new age scented arpeggios of "Seven Waves" seems a world apart, or indeed a "Lixivation" apart. Both are interesting additions to the picture of Ciani, but not quite as eye opening and stunning as the compilation. But if you want more of her work after "Lixivation" this is the most comprehensive set to go for. "Voices of Packaged Souls" is pure synthesizer experimentation while "Seven Waves" in it's new age glory somehow reminds me of the the Human League about the same time. There's just something about those shimmering, moving pads.


Read full review of Seven Waves - Suzanne Ciani on Boomkat.com ©

Subconscious studios

One of the most impressive synthesizer studios in the world must be Cevin Keys Subconscious studios in LA. Not least because Key has managed to produce quite a bit of impressive music there as well, especially the Download and Plateau releases. Here Phil Western, Keys long time musical collaborator, gives a tour of the facilities in 2010:



And here's a clip showing studio work taking place at Subconscious in the summer of 2012:



The following clip shows a much earlier incarnation of Subconscious studios in January of 1995, before it was relocated from Vancouver to LA. The clips feature among others Skinny Puppy and Download member Dwayne R. Goettel, who sadly passed away from a heroin overdose six months later. This clip is probably from the sessions that resulted in Downloads first album "Furnace".



I know I've seen another clip of Cevin Key giving a tour of the studio but can't seem to find it on Youtube at least. If you'r unfamiliar with Keys music and want to try out some of his stuff I would recommend that you start with Download's "Helicopter" and/or Plateau's "Gort Spacebar".