YEARS
OF A LIFETIME
Sometimes I think this guy is trying hard to beat Tangerine Dream's record of "releasing the biggest number of albums per year".
The sympathetic Italian electronic musician MAC is extremely productive, you know. I lost count all ready, but this one is a special
album because it only came out recently but most of the music has been conceived between 1988 and 1995, but had never been properly
arranged or recorded before. In this series "Just Music", this CD-R "Years Of A Lifetime" is his eighth and the album itself counts
just as many tracks. The first few tracks are cheerful, frivolous and inspired by the synthi-pop from the eighties: up tempo rhythms,
nice arrangements and catchy melodies. The instrumentation is not quite extravagant. We have a bass-sequence, a simple and modest
rhythm underneath and on top of that the melody lines, sometimes unison, sometimes in two voices. Especially a track like "A Lesson
To Remember" brings back memories of works by Mark Shreeve, but less bombastic than Shreeve's music on for example "Crash Head".
More modest and suitable for some meditation is the fourth track, followed by a piece with less pop influences but a bit more as
Tangerine Dream in the eighties. Then we hear music in the same vein as Giorgio Moroder did on "Neverending Story". The disc clocks
well over 45 minutes and to my taste the production might have been more powerful and clearer at the same time. The last track on the
album is purely "retro" music with a delicious sequence and compared to the other tracks, it seems a bit odd musically, but
nonetheless exquisite! The percussion in the second part of that last track gives a slightly shaper edge: "retro with balls"!
It's a very nice offering for those who favour the more poppish softer EM.
Menno Von Brucken Fock (The Netherlands) Click HERE to
visit his website
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