Tuesday, April 1, 2014

CASSETTE REVIEW: Andreas Brandal “Hidden Rooms” (Tranquility Tapes)


            When I first saw the title “Hidden Rooms” for this cassette by Andreas Brandal, I couldn’t help but think of a friend who we had that lived in Houston and his house had this small, sort of hidden room in it that you wouldn’t know about if you weren’t told but couldn’t really use for anything much other than storage.   As I listen to the first side of this cassette though, I tend to think more of this hidden room as not being so much as a room you are not aware of, but rather what is hiding in the room such as Narnia.

            Laser type synth starts us out on our journey, but we fairly quickly turn into some slow and brooding synth sounds that wreak of ambience.  There are some 8bit sounds in here, sure, and there come some acoustic guitar strings plucked by the end of the first side, but mainly this just reminds me of space.   It makes me think about opening a door, walking through it and ending up afloat in space, somehow able to breathe without air.

            Side B has an acoustic melody going on, though the synth remains, and then it gears up for a full on synth string orchestra.   There are some haunting vibes, like something out of the X-Files, and there is also a bit of what I like to call The Phantom of the Space Opera because in many ways this just sounds like it belongs in space.   In fact, my genre for this as per Side A which carries over into Side B is “Space Synth” and if that doesn’t exist yet then here it is.  If it should happen to already exist but sound like something else then just know that this is what would be captured if you could somehow record an entire jam session of someone playing an acoustic guitar in zero gravity.  






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