Peter Baumann: Dusk – Album Overview

Since leaving Germany’s ambient overlords Tangerine Dream in 1977, Peter Baumann has cast a particular solo profession: Dusk is his first album in 9 years. Its inspiration would possibly come from life after darkish, however is it a very good pay attention for the wee small hours? Robert Plummer urges warning.

Common songs usually have one thing of the evening about them, for higher or for worse. The evening time might be the appropriate time or it could flip your head round. Nonetheless, few musicians dare to evoke the darkish evening of the soul, that bizarre, woozy, troubled time between 3AM Everlasting and 4 In The Morning.

Because it seems, veteran cosmic crewman Peter Baumann has determined to navigate exactly that quadrant of interior house on his newest album, Dusk.

It might initially appear an unlikely alternative for somebody who touched the stratosphere as one-third of Tangerine Dream’s biggest line-up, taking part in on six of their traditional Nineteen Seventies studio albums. In any case, the Berlin band stay on within the collective reminiscence largely as purveyors of pastoral digital mood-pieces. But they might additionally summon forth sounds from “each past the apocalypse and earlier than the flood”, as Julian Cope as soon as memorably put it.

The album’s placid ultramarine cowl picture, plus its crepuscular title, would possibly lead you to count on some type of aural sedative, a benign New Age Horlicks for the ears. Guess once more. And woe betide you when you attempt listening to it alone with the lights out simply earlier than bedtime.

These eight haunting items, all about five-and-a-half to six-and-a-half minutes lengthy, have an eerie, waterlogged high quality, as if suffocated in darkness. Tentative one-finger keyboard melodies rise and fall towards an epic wash of artificial sound, whereas sparse percussion takes the type of sonar pings or sudden tympanic depth-charges.

Typically, the music hangs suspended in time, like a half-remembered, unquiet reverie. Often, although, the tempo quickens marginally. On the ominous From A Far Land, the rhythm remembers the ticking of a grandfather clock or a dripping faucet, disturbing your relaxation as you vainly attempt to nod off.

Some tracks have titles that belie their contents. Crusing Previous Midnight, for example, brings to thoughts the Delivery Forecast and the nightly closedown of BBC Radio 4. But as an alternative of being becalmed within the Bay of Biscay, this vessel is clearly heading right into a battle zone.

Opening with plaintive sirens and an insistent martial beat, the music steadily piles on the menace because the booming bass line suggests submarines on the prowl. Swooping synths set off ideas of warplanes overhead, whereas repeated bursts of gunfire ring out. Lastly, the drumbeat dies away and peace units in: however is it the aid of a secure haven or the stillness of Davy Jones’ locker?

Dusk mines a wealthy cultural seam, coming because it does a scant few months after the discharge of one other nocturnal ambient tour, The Evening by Saint Etienne.

On their album, Bob Stanley, Sarah Cracknell and Pete Wiggs have been lauded for providing a reassuring glimmer of hope and sanctuary. In distinction, Baumann appears to favour a head-on confrontation with the human terror that comes on the onset of darkness. One is calming, the opposite cathartic: it’s as much as you which of them one you favor.

As you’ll have gathered already, anybody in search of rock & roll mayhem ought to look elsewhere. However because the sound of some velvet pre-dawn, when your ideas should not as straight as you’d like them to be, Baumann’s brooding soundscapes have few equals.

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You’ll find Peter Baumann on Soundcloud right here.

All phrases by Robert Plummer. Extra writing by Robert Plummer might be discovered at his creator’s archive. Robert Plummer can also be on X as @robertp926.