Peter Mergener – Take Off (2 CD)

1 review for Peter Mergener – Take Off (2 CD)

1. 

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

   There is certain craze for Peter Mergener. For his music! Having remixed and fused the both passages of Creatures in a single album, Creatures 2020 in April 2014, the German synthesist revisits Passage in Time in October of the same year. And now it’s the turn of Take Off, his 3rd solo opus which appeared on the German label Cue Records in 1992. Like with Passage in Time, this new version of Take Off includes a remastered edition of the original album as well as a bonus CD which includes music, and that’s not completely clear to me, composed quite recently as well as some different versions (I find that indeed Sunlight can sound like The Eagle and that A Little Bit of Something has some similarities with On Wings) of tracks which appeared on the first edition. The whole thing is carefully presented in a 2 CD digipack which however offers almost no information. And on the album and on Peter Mergener! Amplifying so this perception that the re is still a culture of secret around the mythical musician who left the Software adventure at the end of the 80’s. And as it’s only quite recently that I discovered this period of Mergener, I cannot pronounce on the differences, good or bad, between both works. All that I know on the other hand is that it’s a very good album! We find here this magic which was behind the first 3 years of Software, from 85 to 88, with slow harmoniously jerky structures of rhythms, such as stroboscopic filets falling to pieces, which progress in a great deal of cosmic effects and in jolty orchestrations.

   Outer noises, like voices or dialogues of cosmonauts or still whistlings of shuttles as well as noises of machineries, have always decorated the cosmic soundscape of Software. And by ricochet the one of Peter Mergener. We thus find them massively on Take Off and this is what open the title-track. Winds of Orion and dust of cosmos are sticking to some slow intergalactic woosh while far off a stac cato movement reveals orchestrations which are similar to a sequence of suspense film. Layers of voices cogitate around this orchestral swing of the pendulum where sequences are grafted and waddle with a pace of mocking goblins. Already, the Mergener (Software) magic invades our ears. Lively and harmonious sequences, percussions and electronic jingles, riffs of keyboards and jerky violins are structuring a rhythm which passes in an accelerating mode, as a ride in the cosmic plains. A rhythm pecked by diverse elements of percussions and wrapped by the beautiful harmonies of a synth among which the seraphic layers weavers of earworm add some more of depth to the soundscapes of Take Off. It’s lively! It’s a good electronic rock of the 80’s with a great sound aestheticism. Icarus’ Flight” is a very beautiful track is which uses completely all these facets