Ramp – Arp-en-Ciel

Description

“arp-en-ciel” is probably the most up-to-date album i have released in a long while.

admittedly, some bits had already been recorded between january 2018 and july 2020 but the majority of music came into being in early 2022, just before klaus schulze’s passing. obviously, my music had strongly been influenced by schulze’s work — however, i didn’t want to jump the bandwagon and use schulze’s passing as a vehicle to promote my own work. hence, i decided to postpone its release and, instead, published “happy days” first.

when recording the tracks for “ultima ratio”, i thought to myself that it would be great to return to the simplicity of my earliest music, making use of very simple chordal progressions (not that i know any more complicated ones anyway), lots of improvised soloing, very much in the vein of those who inspired me in the late summer of 1988. the album title just came to mind as a pun on the french “arc-en-ciel” as i used mainly arp synthesisers for the first half of the album. quite witty, huh?

the second half of the album is made up of some recordings that date back to april 2000 when cosmic hoffmann and i had spent a lovely morning, walking through a misty forest (we were quite foggy as well but that would be a different story altogether). a subsequent recording session at klaus’ own quasar studio quite nicely absorbed the atmosphere of that morning but, for some reason, the music had remained unused until i re-discovered it by accident. i took some bits from this session and turned them into some rather ambient affair which i think klaus might have liked, too.

or most probably not, who knows.
credits
released May 2, 2023