Experimental Audio Research
Millennium Music - A Meta-Musical Portrait

THE REVIEW

Once the adventure with Spacemen 3 Sonic Boom ended, after releasing the good solo album Spectrum, he created Spectrum. Simultaneously, he dedicated himself to another project, namely Experimental Audio Research (E.A.R.), where it becomes clear how the English musician is increasingly passionate about the so-called "research music." After all, that is the "zeitgeist" of the period (early '90s) of isolationist music taking root, also on the back of the compilation Ambient 4: Isolationism. On that record, there were artists like Main of Robert Hampson (similar in this sense to the evolution of Robert Hampson's Loop and Spacemen 3, at least from Sonic Boom's side), Aphex Twin, Paul Shutze, Thomas Koner, Jim O'Rourke, the AMM, :Zoviet*France: and E.A.R. themselves. But the roots of isolationism are to be found in the so-called "Kosmiche Musik" and in formations like Popol Vuh of Affenstunde and In Den Garten Pharaos, Tangerine Dream of Zeit, and Cluster of I and II. It's no coincidence that Peter Kember/Sonic Boom, as he himself admitted, considers "Cluster II" a desert island album. Among the albums released by E.A.R., my preference goes to Millenium Music: A Meta-Musical Portrait from 1997. The concept is ambitious and is described as "a soundscape reflecting the time from prehistory and the dinosaur era to modern digital communication." The album consists of 3 long tracks characterized by spatial, cosmic, and sidereal settings. It seems like the soundtrack of a space journey or a sci-fi movie in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey. One might say that this music had already been composed in the '70s by the mentioned Kluster/Cluster. Nothing wrong with that; musical history lives in cycles and recycles, but one might think that maybe the artistic path of post-Spacemen 3 Sonic Boom is a bit predictable. It is certainly very different from the one undertaken by Jason Pierce with Spiritualized (who also had greater followings). Recommended for "cosmic travelers."