Customer Reviews

Midsummer Century

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You float through this music on soft and languid clouds of syth while the haunting melodies are carried often by acoustic instruments. Jonn Serrie is so tasteful. With this album he began his move away from planetarium space music, a genre of which he was the absolute master, to something more romantic. This is wonderful music for making love, bodywork, dreaming and astral traveling. It has a heavenly, otherworldly tranquility to it. Throughout, this music is refined and intensely well created.You think of Serrie as a composer with historical echoes of Ravel and Debussy,only what he writes is 50 years ahead of any other ambient composer.

Before I purchased this CD I discovered it on an internet radio broadcast. There was a powerfully pastoral salience to Serrie's music that emerged above the other new age selections I was listening to that caused me to pause and go to my computer and see what was playing; each time I checked it was 'Midsummer Century.' I find 'Midsummer Century' more evocative of a deeper peacefulness than I found in recordings of similar genre.

This is one of my favorite Jonn Serrie albums. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is written with tremendous emotion and a seeming longing for something unfulfilled. Only Jonn can make this kind of feeling come through a keyboard.

This was the first CD I bought of Serrie's. It's a little lighter than his deep space work (Planetary Chronicles) but still ambient rather than typical new-age. Think alien planet as opposed to cruising in deep space.

The first four tracks are the exceptions to the remainer of the CD and are appealing to most anyone. Beginning with the fifth track, "Velvet" Jonn begins his spell casting as the music progressively becomes more free flowing, airy and subdued. (I personally think that there are some subliminal messages in these songs as it took me several attempts to stay awake to the end.) The surprise is that half way into the "Ancient of Days" a melody and percussion line emerges and after a moment drifts away. Each song smoothly flows into the next and lulls the listener into a deeper state of relaxation while not being totally space music, it is perhaps the musical representation of the last strands of our earth's atmosphere. Adding Jonn's "Tingri" makes this a nice set if you don't get anything else by him.

If you are looking for music, I advise listening to someone else. If you like listening to calculated noise, then this is more in line for you. Sorry, but this album and others by Mr. Serrie are just "stuff".