Peter Mergener – Creatures 2020

1 review for Peter Mergener – Creatures 2020

1. 

   Sylvain Lupari / gutsofdarkness.com & synthsequences.blogspot.ca – 2022-11-22

   As much tell it to you at once; I fell in love again! We are at the beginning of the 90’s. Here in my country EM, such as structured and played by Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Ashra, Kraftwerk, Jarre and Vangelis became absent in medias and very extremely rare on radio shows. Every Sunday, we are entitled to a national radio program which broadcasts some cosmic music and another independent radio station which broadcasts 2 hours of New Age. At that time it was kind of nice but we were far from traditional Berlin School where EM took a more digital tangent. And it’s there that I heard Software’s Electronic-Universe. The track, not the album. I was stroke and seduced at once by these so crystal clear cosmic tones. These sequences with glass tones which float and which also draw circular rhythms in the panting of artificial violins. And I jumped on all that Software made; good as not that good! And I always looked for this sound, years after Mergener’s departure who had yet tickled my ears with his Instinctive Traveller in 1996. I finally found it with Creatures 2020. However this last Peter Mergener’s album is not a novelty, far from it. It’s a synthesis of 2 albums which preceded his first departure from Software in 1991; Creatures and another album produced in 1994, Let There Be More Light (Creatures II). This Creatures 2020 became a double album where Peter Mergener revised and remasterised the 19 tracks of both original CD’s, melting the epic tracks Song for the Whales and Let there be More Light into one track for each, making new versions of Creatures, Secret Night, Lions Dance, Rainforest and Let there be More Light and also adding 4 new tracks; Insekts Talk, Morninglight, The Pride of Creation and Treibjagd (it appears that Wildlife and Sinking Ship were also replaced) to this allegorical electronic sonic fresco which brings us back literally towards the wonderful cosmic universe of Electronic Universe.

   And everything starts with the very theatrical opening, almost dramatic one should I say, which introduces God Said” on thunders of symphonic drum rolls. We hear the breaths of angels there get lost in the dawns of the Milky Way’s and of their artificial violins which sigh some fine waltzing harmonies. And the explosion comes suddenly! Delicate sonic particles with ill-assorted ringings explode here and there on the soft regular beatings of a cosmic heart. An outer-world voice exposes a narrative of this genesis while that quite slowly “God Said” floats adrift to roll around into the introductory waves of “Crying Beast” and of its delicate spheroidal rhythm weaved in sequenced keys to the tones of harp. The wealth of Creatures 2020 lies in these wonderful sequences with the ringings of fragile knocks of anvil or xylophones which draw hybrid rhythms of which the imperceptible figures coil up and crisscross into forms as much allegorical as their tones. The world of Software op ens then to our ears with this delicate ambient rhythm which swirls in the chirpings of birds