artist: The Atman Project country of origin: Germany style(s): Ambient, environmental essential releases: Love And Pain (Wergo)

The German label Wergo label has for decades been associated with quality avant-garde electronica, with its distinguished catalogue of releases including works by such seminal figures as John Cage and Karl Stockhausen. More accessible than the music of either of those, yet extraordinary in its own way, is this album from The Atman Project. It pairs Ronald Steckel and Heiko Russe, two Germans whose partnership started with a series of scores for theatre productions and eventually resulted in this one-of-kind masterpiece.

Love And Pain is the fruits of three years of research into noise, voices and music using the Synclavier II computer synthesiser, at its time the state of the art in music technology. Many of the sounds sourced from natural and man-made environments and used on the album are not simply sampled, but totally transformed. The howling, violin-like opening to the track “What You Will”, for example, was originally a sample of a wolf in the Bavarian forest, but you wouldn't know it unless you read the sleeve notes. Over the course of eight compositions, hypnotic melody lines weave in and out of a rich, colourful tapestry of drones and chords which fly, shimmer and rumble in all the right places. What really impresses is that it's so emotional. Even when the music reaches the peaks of its trippy, transportive power it is still grounded by a powerful, almost mournful human quality that I've rarely heard in electronic music.  Curiously, as an exercise in drone music it's not particularly Eastern-sounding yet the album's thematic cue is explicitly Eastern: the word “Atman”, is taken from the sacred Hindu scriptures The Upanishads and roughly translated means “the spirit in man”.

Skeckel and Russe have maintained Germany's proud tradition of being the first to explore new music technology, and with Love And Pain have pulled off something remarkable: the sound of machines crying.

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