Customer Reviews

Digital Moonscapes

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I love synthesizer music and on the cover of this CD it advertizes the album as: "An evolutionary synthesizer tour de force."

That's a hyperbolism.

Digital Moonscapes (1984) is far from being a spectacular musical achievement. You'd do best to ignore this hyped assertion and save yourself a headache in the process.

Wendy Carlos' experience with synthesizers reaches back to the mid-Sixties and her encounter with Bob Moog. Her music, according to Patti Jean Birosik's book, has even gone cinematic, appearing in films like A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. There is no denying that Carlos is both musically educated as well as an accomplished recorded synthesist.

The theme of Digital Moonscapes (12 tracks; 56:22), as the liner notes written by the artist herself make mention, is the moons within our solar system. Carlos dedicates the album to NASA.

What I like most about the CD is its vivid, snazzy cover art, by Bradley Hales Clark (an image different than the one pictured here).

As for the music, the album is divided into two suites.

The first, entitled Cosmological Impressions, is the best.

The album begins promisingly with its first movement, my favorite of the twelve, called Genesis. It's sublime and quaint without being grating. Eden takes me to, not a paradisaical oasis, but to a carnival; it sounds like delightful carousel music to me. The third movement, I.C. (Intergalactic Communications), another goodie, reminds me a bit of Philip Glass's score to the Koyaanisqatsi film.

Then comes the second suite entitled Moonscapes and the album, for me, spirals downward from there. Tracks 4-6 I especially find to be shapeless and discordant, enough to want to make me down an aspirin.

In sum, Digital Moonscapes begins on a high note but then quickly descends into annoying experimental terrain. Overall, the instrumentals on Moonscapes are meandering and tuneless, to the point of their being uninviting, if not entirely unlistenable.

The album, despite its exaggerated claim, is more of a letdown than a so-called masterpiece.