Rogue Element – Storm passage

1 review for Rogue Element – Storm passage

1. 

   Sylvain Lupari / Guts Of Darkness – 2022-11-22

   Rogue Element is the perfect example that music can survives and evolve both its authors and those whom they are influenced by. Strongly inspired by the sequential style of Berlin School and more particularly by the music of Tangerine Dream, Rogue Element reappears after more than 6 years of absence to pursue the Dream and Berlin School musical quest. Initially written (and released in some 200 copies) in 2000, Storm Passage is the very first Rogue Element album and had been sold out as quickly as a thunderstorm could unfurl in a whirl. An album which wears pretty well its naming where Brendan Pollard and Jerome Ramsey propose 3 tracks of boiling and alternating sequences that soak in a rhythmic maelstrom as much intense as unpredictable. Musical structures very near the roots of Tangerine Dream, but with puzzling and progressive evolutions, demonstrating that the English duet is more than a weak reflection of a group who fascinated so many fans of electronic and progressive music.

   Emerging from aquatic depths Infinite Imagery takes a rather shy flight with its floating strata to deviants and spectral sonorities. Heavy morphic strata which undulate such a world of ether on the waves of a synth to fluty breaths, a little as on TDs Underwater Sunlight. And the references can only abound in this brilliant opus which wants a real musical journey in the heart of the Dream tones. A zigzagging sequence shapes a rhythmic to dry-eyed and hatched flow which staggers with solidity among a full-array of synthesized breaths to multiple musical flavors and soft layers of a discreet Mellotron. The rhythm is hard-line, and takes refuge into rippling ethereal dazes, just to get his breath back. The calm before the storm, because at around the 13th minute, another sequence introduces a hiccoughing cadence before it crosses another one, heavier and more incisive, subdividing a tempo which becomes more and more anarchic. A superb passage where everything collides on a chaotic rhythmic which wraps itself of soft Mellotron blows and which will be hiding in an enormous sonorous black hole, crossing the psychedelic fragrances of a risky and complex 60s Pink Floyd. It leaves another 15 minutes of music to uncountable sound tributaries which throw into our ears, such a sound feast. A soft synth wanders its breaths in a foggy Mellotron, before a last sequential warning shot shapes a furious rhythmic and adorned of some keyboard keys which point out like lonely tricks. Mellotron flutes, wandering choruses, waddling keyboard with arpeggios that wind such as sparks of a hardly shaken sea accompany this epic title of which the sequential movement hems like an undersea wave breathing a hybrid thermal noise in a title where the duality of rhythms and harmonies is the cornerstone of this amazing musical journey.
   After this long title to surprising musical deviances, Rogue Element proposes 2 more brief tracks. Following its morphic intro, Encounter at Stormwater Crossing bursts with a furious sequential approach, competing in address with the art that Franke implanted with Poland. Here, the rhythmic sequential explodes of an incredible ferocity multiplying doubloons in a suggestive torrential echo, beneath the dazes of a soft Mellotron to fluty and ethereal blows. Just imagined mixtures between Epsilon in Malaysian Pale, Poland and Exit and you have Encounter at Stormwater Crossing. A very good music piece full of a sequential energy that will strip the paint out of your walls!
   Clearly more quiet, with its dazing intro where Mellotron breaths teem, Elements crosses the sword of rhythm at around the 4th minute point with a beautiful sequence which skips and jumps up under the wings of a synth at once symphonic and Mellotron. A good track imprint of a sober pace which concludes this re release so much expected of Storm Passage.

   2010. Sylvain Lupari / Guts Of Darkness