Exotic analog synthesizers create beautiful ambient music
author: Richard Lainhart
Todd Barton, long-time resident composer and music director with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (he's scored every one of the Bard's plays - twice) offers a contemplative new CD of recent electronic music featuring tonalities drawn from his collection of esoteric analog synthesizers. From the expressive, almost Romantic horn lines of the Steiner-Parker Synthacon and EVI controller in Drifting and Offering to the classic Subotnick-ish Buchla 200e excursions in Metalliton and StormBirds, Analog Horizonings overall tone is calm and reflective, with a focus on the beauty of pure sound rather than aggressive rhythms or rapid changes in mood. I'm particularly impressed by SlowEvolution and SpaceMetal, in which the glassy tones of the Buchla are stretched and warped in MetaSynth into a lovely sustained cloud of ever-changing harmonics, but lovers of dark or abstract ambient music will find something worth hearing in every track. Highly recommended.
Read more...
Todd has utilized his time ... quite ... oh yes! ... quite well!
author: Charmi
The sounds are exquisite, unbelievably pure and creatively graceful. It is, to me, both communication with and as a higher source. I never want it to stop... it makes me happy to be alive.
Read more...
New analog music is open and spacious
author: Bruce Bayard
This new recording, using all anolog synths, is extremely open and spacious. The layering in Slow Evolution is particularly compelling. There is a wonderful pulse to this music, not in driving rhythms, but in its wave-like recurrence. The tracks don't have so much a beginning or end as they do a middle, which is, I think, the idea behind "horizonings": the territory beyond the boundary.
Read more...