Michael Hoenig
Departure From The Northern Wasteland

If there's one thing that surprised me, it's that I couldn't find a review of this album. I thought it was a fairly well-known work, but maybe it is only in my somewhat twisted mind that tends not to care about the popularity of musicians to decide what to listen to. In fact, I often tend to set aside artists who are too famous due to a little voice that always whispers to me: "If a work appeals to too many people it means the author had to compromise so that their art receives all this approval."

I am aware that this can also be a form of prejudice. I struggle to approach more famous bands, habitually ending up listening to lesser-known bands first and then more celebrated ones. If this can have its drawbacks, it certainly also has some merits. One? I can hardly create myths. When a band becomes a myth, often the overall vision is lost and the ability to objectively evaluate a work in the musical context in which it is placed. Well, thanks to this attitude of mine, I am now here to talk to you about Michael Hoenig and his work, dated 1978: "Departure from the Northern Wasteland". Initially a member of Agitation Free, with whom he recorded the first two albums and a live album, he then went on to support Tangerine Dream on their Australian tour of '75. Listening to the live recordings from Adelaide and Melbourne (both from the Tangerine Leaves series, two of my favorites and highly recommended) you immediately notice Michael's contribution, the use of the sequencer in an articulate, aggressive way, often predominating over the melodic line outlined by the mellotron. Not by chance, the most valid sequencer patterns by Tangerine Dream are found, besides in Ricochet and Orange 75 (Tangerine Tree vol.22), in the two Australian concerts. His first and definitely more interesting solo work was completed only a few years later, in '78, a year in which many of the more introspective cosmic bands had already given their best, and more melodic electronics, launched by the immense success of Oxygene and Kraftwerk (from Autobahn onwards), as well as less known figures, above all Peter Baumann, was starting to emerge. The album in question represents, in a way, a blend between these two currents. It is indeed an album that maintains long, dramatic compositions, rendered however with a more dynamic sound that makes extensive use of the sequencer which composes the rhythmic section sublimely, and of synth and mellotron that contend for the melodic and harmonic side of the work. In Hoenig's music, you can see the union of musical characteristics belonging to different artists (or different works by the same artist) from a few years earlier: the mellotron of Rubycon with the aggressive sequencers of Ricochet are the main components of the title track: a sort of transition between past and future, between early metaphysical electronics and the new kind, which tends to look toward the large audience. The transition seems to arrive definitively through the grooves of "Hanging Garden Transfer" and in the concluding "Sun and Moon". Gradually the melodic component takes over and the sequencer follows more captivating harmonic progressions, somehow indebted to Jarre of two years earlier, yet still of sublime class and elegance. Among these lies "Voices of Where", a much more experimental track dominated by a minimalist approach in both the mellotron's use and electronic noises, almost as if to remind from where it all started.

This work represents the sum of everything that had been produced in previous years, and its assembly is so refined it could represent the ideal transition between the pioneering early years and what is to come. As if to represent the imaginary end of a cycle; yes, imaginary, because the evolution of electronic sound in the '70s is actually a progressive and continuous process and this album is certainly no exception. It is only the listener's mind that needs reference points, beginnings, and endings, in order to place a work in a specific historical context. Here, for me "Departure.." represents the upper temporal boundary of the early electronics, those of long compositions dominated by mellotron and sequencer, against which we can turn the page to focus on what, in those years, was instead taking shape: electronic pop, industrial, ambient, new age, and all the genres that emerged the following decade.   

Rating out of ten: 7.5