X - Klaus Schulze

Advantages: Nice hypnotic grooves and soloing.
Disadvantages: Overlong, can be boring in parts.

...Klaus Schulze has released so much old material in boxed sets or re-issues in the past 10 years that it almost passed my notice that he hasn't released a straight forward new studio album for ages. And here it is, supposedly a "fan pleasing" album featuring a mix of his famed 70s sequencer style with his more rhythmic contemporary sound. The end result is rather a joyful upbeat album for Schulze. The standard overlong tracks are still there, but if you adjust your listening head to just float along, they pass by remarkably quickly. The 30 minute "Playmate In Paradise" is really a track in two halves. The first is his standard contemporary style of rhythmic backbeats with only very sparse soloing. The track is built up very slowly (as is Schulze's style, why rush?) Just as you think it is going on for far to long, it is enhanced... Read review

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Advantages: A great powerhouse of a score to reckon with
Disadvantages: Incohesive action music not the best way to go about

...By apparent common consensus, the third in the trilogy of X-Men films, The Last Stand, is considered as the least successful. Providing the apocalyptic conclusion to the team of mutants of Wolverine, Storm, Jean Grey, Cyclops etc., The Last Stand details the invention of a possible "cure" that will make mutants "regular people". This of course does not sit all that well with a certain other set of mutants, lead by a magnetic dude called Magneto, and as a result he recruits a bunch of others to start a war against the cure, which will again pit him and the mutants of Charles Xavier at opposite ends, this time resulting in the most earth shattering of climaxes. Musically the X-Men series has been one of the most unstable. The first X-Men film was scored by the late Michael Kamen, who took a very restrained and lyrical direction. Due... Read review

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Advantages: Glorious early 90s electronica by two genuine pioneers
Disadvantages: Might be hard to find

...Brain child of Pete Namlook (aka Peter Kuhlman) and Richie Hawtin, From Within was one of the first albums that alerted me to the joys of electronica and thus has a very special place in my musical heart. Pete Namlook, for those that have never encountered him, is a virtual electronica factory, at one point churning out an album almost once a fortnight and released on his independent Fax label. His work is wide and occasionally inconsistent. He has collaborated with innumerable musicians, many of which are of the highest order, such as the grandmaster of krautrock Klaus Schulze, Geir Jensen (aka Biosphere), Bill Laswell, Tetsu Inoue, Bobby Bird (aka HIA) and Jonah Sharp (and the list goes on and on). Pick up a Namlook CD and you can find yourself listening to anything from world music to experimental, minimalist ambient to early... Read review

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