Title - ‘Past Present & Future’
Artist - Brainticket
For those following along at home, and even more so for fans of a) Brainticket and b) delirious Swiss Krautrock, yes, it has been over 14 years since the band released a new studio album! I know, right! Brianticket founder and leader, Joel Vandroogenbroeck may well have opened his recording career with Brainticket in 1970 with a trio of albums that bounced off the presses like they were going out of fashion - Cottonwoodhill, Psychonaut (1971), and Celestial Ocean (1973); the latter now re-released this month also as a 2-CD deluxe edition version of the masterpiece album, that now comes accompanied by a rare live concert from the same year - but he then slowed his musical roll down to just over an album a decade thereafter!
The brand new Brainticket album is Past Present & Future, which begins with an epic 2-part composition that has to be heard to be believed. Maybe it took him 14 years to get this one song, ‘Dancing On A Volcano’ just right, who knows, but it is most certainly one hell of a way to open; and reintroduce Brainticket and Vandroogenbroeck back to the musical fold.
Listening to Past Present & Future, it’s easy to identify that this new studio recording has got to easily be one of Vandroogenbroeck’s most accomplished, most ambitious, most sophisticated of works. Evoking the familiar rhythms and melodies of his past work, yet expanding into whole new horizons beyond the scope of what he might well have only dreamt he had been able to accomplish back in the 70’s, the new album dips and sways, skips and holds its ground, but never stumbles.
Incorporating the musical sensation of moving back and forth through time, the unity of man and technology, inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near, that premise of Machines become human, humans become machines is brought to the fore here as both a conceptual warning - and a damning promise.
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