Bownik, Adam Certamen - "Magma"

Fine ambient electronica (8/10) Musical reflection of Mundus subterraneus. Fine ambient electronica. Especially fans of space music, the sound of 80s and such artists as Klaus Schulze or J.M. Jarre should be delighted. The only thing I didn't like is a track no. 2. It's a short piano miniature and while Adam is a skilled player, this piece lacks the power of his space-musical compositions. [mirror @ archive.org] | [Artist's Website] SUPPORT INDEPENDENT ARTISTS If you like this album and you can afford it, consider supporting the artist by making a donation on this page - use the button "Donate" in the upper left corner.

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Pan:core - "Memories (2001 - 2005)"

Piano + electronica + beautiful melodies (9/10) auf diesem album habe ich eine auswahl an tracks zusammengestellt, die ich im laufe der letzten jahre gemacht habe. jeder einzelne von ihnen hat für mich eine persönliche bedeutung. die klangqualität ist eher mittelmäszig und das mixing ist wirklich nicht so gut - und dennoch; ich mag es sehr. vielleicht kann euch das eine oder andere stück berühren. More classical album than other Pan:core's recordings. It mostly comprises of simple but beautiful melodies played on piano / keyboard with electronic background. A very melancholic album. And it includes another stunning electronic cover of a classical tune - this time a piece from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (17 - spaetsommer). Pan:core's covers are masterpieces. As to the rest of the album, it is very good, but I prefer his more electronic and experimental side, as on No Way To Win. He's a true master of this genre. It becomes clear after listening this album to the end, because the last track is completely different from the rest - it's not a simple piano tune, but hard electronic experimental madness. ;-) I instantly felt sorry that not all 18 tracks were in this style. And a final remark - I like both sides of Pan:core - simple piano pieces and experimental electronic madness, so I don't mind mixing them on one album. But I'm afraid that for some listeners, who like only straightforward music, the ending of this album would be unbearable and could ruin all the fun they had from listening to this record.

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Massia, Thierry de - "Shift"

Almost like Beethoven... (6/10) New age très mélodique, les différents morceaux sont tour à tour torturés, mélancoliques, doux ou apaisants. Casque sur les oreilles, yeux fermés, la musique invite à la rêverie. I have mixed feelings after listening to this album. Thierry de Massia is definitely a talented composer. In fact he even can be compared to Beethoven. Like his famous predecessor, he's talented but he must be completely deaf. These cheap synthetic sounds imitate real instruments so poorly that ugliness of the sound kills any fun one could have from listening to nice melodies. In my opinion, Mr. de Massia should limit himself to composing only and give his score to a real band or to a person who is properly equipped and knows how to use synthesizers. As for the tunes, some tracks bear classical influences ("Un signe", "Tales of mister frog", "Shift"). They have very simple melodies, as if composed for children, but could be quite nice if not for those synthetic sounds. In their current form they are practically unlistenable. The other half of songs sounds like transferred directly from the '80s ("La chanson de Julie", "RailRoad", "Jet Set"), straight from the recording session of Jean Michel Jarre. So these tracks are extremely unoriginal, but on the other hand, imitation is almost perfect. In fact "RailRoad" could be advertised as unpublished Jarre's tune from the '80s and I think everybody would believe it. And in these electronic tunes the artist does not try to imitate the classical orchestra and therefore ugly synthetic sounds can be tolerated (in fact they even give this "old '80s" feeling that can be treated as done on purpose). So this part of the album is quite nice if one is not bothered with lack of originality. SUPPORT INDEPENDENT ARTISTS If you like this album and you can afford it, consider supporting the artist by making a donation on this page - use the button "Donate" in the upper left corner.

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Abogix (J.K.), the - "Welcome in my dreams!"

Just Abogix (8/10) Hier ist es nun...mein 5. Album! Wieder hat es mir sehr viel spass gemacht beim produzieren dieses Albums und hoffe es macht euch genau soviel freude beim zuhören!!! Dieses Album ist diesmal etwas fröhlichergeworden,nicht so dunkel. Es sollte gute laune verbreiten und hört sich auch teilweise lustig an. Es geht weiter Freunde...und es ist kein ende in sicht! Wer meine Musik liebt,der darf sich ruhig auf viele weitere Alben von mir freuen...denn in meiner fantasie...in meiner Welt...gibt's noch viel viel mehr zu entdecken! Das Cover zu diesem Album wurde von "ducadidoom" gemacht! Ich find's toll!...tausend dank!!! (Ach...muss das schön sein von Bergen umzingelt zu sein und gesunde Luft einzuatmen...seuftz!) Schönen gruss an meine Familie....Mom (Mi-Schops)...Dad (Pirat) (Sean Connery)... Jim (J.P.) & Sandra & Lou...Steve (MonChichi) & Cindy The Abogix (J.K.) Just Abogix. Anybody need more recommendations? For those who didn't listen to his other albums yet: electronic sounds arranged with talent. Very atmospheric tunes. However, I must say I prefer his darker compositions. "Tales of mystery and imagination" are the best. SUPPORT INDEPENDENT ARTISTS If you like this album and you can afford it, consider supporting the artist by making a donation on this page - use the button "Donate" in the upper left corner.

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Shattering Planet - "Depths Of My Mind, the" [SP]

WANTED: Better samples (5/10) Shattering Planet is my alias for my experimental music. I hope you find it to be enjoyable. If you do enjoy any of my song or albums and you have a Jamendo account I would greatly appreciate reviewing any of my albums as well as becoming my fan so you get notified of any new music I release. Also remember: You can use any of my music on YouTube videos as long as it isn’t commercial, but please give my band credit for the song. Thanks! THIS SONG IS IN LOW DEFINITION! AN HD VERSION CAN BE FOUND AT http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/105386. This was my first song I ever wrote and published. I hope you enjoy it! The melody is much too simple for my liking, but that's the matter of taste. On a more objective note, the quality of samples is terrible. Particularly a flute sounds totally artificial and unnatural. However, if it is your first composition, it is not bad at all. Many popular artists started from much lower level. Work hard and who knows?

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zero-project - "Disabled Emotions Suite"

Beautiful melodies (8/10) "Disabled emotions" suite is an album that talks about the feelings that must be "disabled" sometimes in our life. Disabled emotions because we choose to disable them, or because we were forced to... Thank you for your support. Minimalistic neoclassical instrumental album. It is characterized by beautiful melodies, which are - unfortunately - wrapped in plastic pseudo-orchestral accompaniment. Not particularly good electronic samples of winds and strings lower the positive impression generated by high composing skills of the artist. I would love to hear it re-recorded by a real orchestra - these tunes fully deserve it, as they deserve 10 points on Jamendo scale. For the tunes as they are recorded now I give 8 points, which is still not bad rating. Let it stand as a proof of quality of this work. Every note is exactly at its right place, so that combined with others they can form a perfect melody striking the listener with a full power of its haunting beauty. How come this guy doesn't write scores to the Hollywood blockbusters? Zimmer, Horner and Williams would have a strong rival.

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zero-project - "Fairytale 2: The orchestral expansion"

Well executed but way too pompous (7/10) "Fairytale 2: The orchestral expansion" is an additional album to the "Fairytale 2" game soundtrack. This album contains five orchestral parts: Three new compositions and two improved and re-mastered versions of "Valley of tears" and "Lux aeterna". All contents of this album can be used for free for any purpose. I hope you enjoy it :) Well, it is not a bad recording. It is well orchestrated and quite good from the technical side - the artist uses quality samples or other electronic equipment to successfully imitate orchestral sounds. It is still obvious that these are not real instruments, but your ears would not bleed like with so many similar works. Of course, these songs would be much more enjoyable, if played by an orchestra, but thanks to the artist's skills, the sound is tolerable. So what's wrong here? The melodies. Yes, yes, I know, they are so beautiful, powerful, full of emotions, drama etc. that... it's really too much. They are totally overblown, just like their pretentious Latin titles - desperately trying to be something more than simple pop neoclassical music. Everybody likes sweet taste, right? But what about a typical wedding cake? They are so sweet and heavy that you have enough after just one bite. This album is a big, colorful, beautiful, dense wedding cake, covered with pink icing. Try to eat all five tiers. Despite the above complaints, I still quite enjoyed this work, but my taste for music is highly eclectic. So if you're a dedicated fan of "real" classical music - beware.

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Nikila - "Short Tracks"

Another masterpiece from the Queen of Electronica (10/10) This album is a part of the project Vacui Spacii, launched by Martin Eschoyez. I used here material from tracks i already released, recycled material from tracks i didn't upload and new tracks i composed for this project. I also used samples from The Freesound Project Ulterius is a re-mix of a phon's track End [...] The idea is that the concepts attached to music inspire other artists to manipulate and reinterpret, recreate or destroy them to generate new audiovisual works. The idea is to release not only the concepts but the works, the materials they were made with, the typography, the music. The idea is to free them for exploring the potential of shared knowledge and inspiring others to wonder about this freedom. When all is said and done, everything comes from an empty space : the feelings, the sound waves, the pencil movement and its traces, the experimentation on a grid of voxels which, in the end, is just an empty space on a digital canvas. So now, it's up to you, enjoy the journey : BE CREATIVE ! [Artist's Blog]

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It's very diverse electronica of superb quality. Almost everything is perfect on this album - crystal sound, the quality of samples, mixing, the melodies. All sounds so fresh and natural, as if recorded by a real band. In fact some tracks could as well be placed under contemporary instrumental music, not simple electronica. I don't know how many real instruments Nikila used for this album (if any), but I doubt it could be so much as it seems. Some of these totally natural sounds simply have to be artificial. And it only confirms her true mastery.

But that's not all. The diversity of this recording is breathtaking. Each song is completely different, full of different ideas, played on different instruments, representing a different genre. Apart from the said contemporary instrumental, we have here nu jazz, downtempo, breakbeat, even industrial. If she let herself put so many ideas into short, under 30-minute album, how huge must be her creativity. It's scary. People shouldn't be so good. ;-) For some artists it would be enough for their whole career.

And that's still not all! One could think that so many different elements contained in such short tracks just have to generate total senseless chaos. And probably they would. With any regular artist, who is not a musical genius. But for Nikila it's a piece of cake. Everything fits perfectly, as if designed by evolution, by trial and error, over millions of years. There's no room for a coincidence. They just had to sound this way. It's so obvious once you already heard them.

I have only one complaint - they are too short. I read the description and I know it's a deliberate move. But these songs are so packed with highly condensed awesomeness, that one minute is really much too short to properly appreciate them. It's as if somebody forced you to admire talent of Hieronymus Bosch by showing his works for 5 seconds each. Wouldn't it be a torture?

For the time being, the only solution for listening to this album without risking a painful death from a musical hunger, is to play it on loop. But that's only a half measure, unfortunately. I WANT THEM LONGER! ;-) I was really tempted to lower my rating because of that, but I came to a conclusion that it would be very unfair to punish these compositions just because they are short.

By the way, what a pity Phon left Jamendo. He would go mad from happiness seeing Nikila used one of his songs. On second thought, he could fall into catatonia, so maybe it's better he can't see it.

By the way (II), I was so lucky as to hear this album in a lossless format, because Nikila was so generous to share the original WAV files with me. I don't know if she would be willing to share them with others, but I would try to ask her if I were you - the listening pleasure will be doubled, that's for sure. This is the work that should be heard in the best format possible.

By the way (III), I know it's April Fools' Day today, but I'm gravely serious here, people.

Chojron - "Among The Raindrops"

The match has been won (but barely) (6/10) Originally I was going to release this album as full-lenght, with 10-12 songs, but once I've lost all my projects from computer, so I would have to do everything again even for improve anything in those finished pieces. Nowadays I'm working on other music but some day I will start again with this. However, I hope you will enjoy 'Among The Raindrops' in the present form. This is a very uneven space music album. The detailed review of the particular tracks: (why not every album is so perfect I could write "awesome" and move on? ;-P ) 01: The sound of keyboard simulating a wind instrument is terrible (other samples are much better). Still, I "buy" this track, because of a great melody, fine disturbing atmosphere and clever arrangement. If only the artist replaced this unfortunate plastic oboe with a real one. 02: Terrible plastic drums on the foreground and a primitive melody. Yuck. 03: A very repetitive main tune, ugly plastic drums playing very obvious rhythms - definitely not my cup of tea. 04: A nice Jarre-like keyboard playing a disturbing melody, distorted electronic pan flute (this is one of the ways to mask plastic sound of a cheap equipment, people) adding space-music-al atmosphere - not bad at all! 05 - More mainstream electronica with faster and more distinct beats, fine melody and atmosphere, not bad arrangement, acceptable sound - downloaded and kept. To sum up - the artist has still much to learn, but even at this stage of artistic evolution he is often able to produce tracks that can be fun to listen to. Of course, only when someone is into space music (I am), as for fans of more experimental electronica it may be primitive and for fans of techno - boring (not that space music is generally primitive, but that some IDM-ish people may think so).

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Van Syla - "Death of a Star, the"

Wow! There are so many musically deaf people around here... (1/10) A very weak attempt at electronic piano ambient. The tunes are primitive (with a catastrophic climax in the horrendous title track). They could maybe work as a soundtrack for Teletubbies or as background music in a hotel's elevator, but that's all. Then we have orchestration. The artist totally loses his grip when it comes to combining more tracks in one piece (see "The Death of a Star" again). Particular instruments do not form a cohesive whole, but rather fight with each other for supremacy. Pure piano pieces with only subtle synthesizer background are better (see "Passing Passion", the best on this album - I'd give it something like 5/10 rating). And finally, the biggest crime of Van Syla - use of primitive cheap keyboard with terrible plastic sound (or lousy samples on computer). It renders this album almost unlistenable for someone with even traces of musical hearing. There's nothing wrong with plastic sound, where it fits - where the artist deliberately goes for synthetic sound (see the whole 8bit genre, for example). But in such Oldfield-like music that Van Syla tries to record it does not fit at all. All these background effects that accompany piano are supposed to add space and atmosphere to the main piano melody. To achieve this they would have to sound natural. You cannot substitute a plastic bucket for a tubular bell, just because it is hollow. And you cannot substitute $20 Casio keyboard for real instruments, nature sounds and field recordings. It can be done with synthetic sounds, but it is really really difficult. It requires good equipment and high skills. Van Syla lacks at least one of them. Of course, piano on this album is probably also synthetic, but it sounds better (as usual). I don't know the reason - either piano is easier to mimic or keyboard makers have more experience, but they usually more or less succeed even in cheap equipment. The effect is almost never as atrocious as with other instruments or sounds. But maybe I am insane? As you can easily see this album is highly praised by the masses. So, can they all be wrong??? Well, it seems for many people the simple melody is everything they need (and the simpler and more primitive the better). These tunes could be written by a talented graduate of a two-week correspondence harmony course (or - these days - by a good computer program). That's OK with me, even if I don't dig it. Many genres feature primitive melodies (check out eurodance, for example) and may still be fun, if done properly. But festering this particular genre with cheap synthetic sounds is a crime (like it would be with classical or early music). That is something I cannot understand or accept. So, to summarize, if your favorite musical genre is nursery rhyme and you think you wouldn't notice if Mike Oldfield replaced tubular bells with steel barrels on his debut album – Van Syla is waiting for you with plenty of beautiful music. If not – for Mozart's sake, stay away! The album has been released on Jamendo and is available for downloading in mp3 or ogg format.