Customer Reviews

Movements

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Movements was the first album I heard from Solar Fields, but it is in fact the sixth album from the Swedish electronic music artist Magnus Birgersson. At my first casual listening, the album caught me complete off-guard and I was struck with awe by the incredibly detailed soundscapes and the hauntingly beautiful and gorgeous atmospherics of this album.

The music flows without breaks in an precise and well-thought out manner, each of the eleven tracks telling a different story, creating a different mood and atmosphere. From the majestic monolith of Sol, to the unstoppable clockwork rotation of Circles of Motion, the slightly ethnic sounding Dust, the enigmatic and catchy Das Bungalow, all the way to the ominous and dark The Road to Nothingness and finally back into the light by the bright and optimistic Breeze.

Solar Fields displays an unusual skill and mastery of his studio containing a vast array of analog and digital synthesizers, computer programs and sound devices. The musical landscapes created are stunningly organic and have an almost tangible, yet surreal feel to them. The sounds are clearly meticulously hand-crafted and come alive with a surprising mixture of sterility and grit: you may not find your plain vanilla 303 basslines here, but lush and reverberant pads, static buzzes, grinding noises and clicks, vibrating and droning basslines, morphing textures and various string instruments plucked and played, all underpinned at the appropriate spots by mesmerizing rhythm loops and drum tracks.

The soundscapes, melodies and rhythms are bristling with an enormous level of detail and even after dozens of concentrated listening with my eyes closed, I still manage to find new sonic and melodic details. The music never threatens to stray into boredom, repetitiveness or over-sweetness, but manages to balance on the edge between dark abysses and lucid lightness.

If you do not wish to download the album as MP3, you can purchase the physical CD from Ultimae Record's web shop (Ultimae.com). The album package is an artwork on its own, containing a booklet with beautiful color photographs dedicated to each track's atmospherics. Surprisingly, Ultimae Records even attached a personal greeting to me as well as an incense stick in my package - what a lovely gesture!

This is electronic downtempo music at its best - in fact, one of the very few albums in my CD-collection without a single weak part. Far from the sometimes mindless repeated loops of many trance and psybient albums, Movements is intelligent, extremely well-crafted, beautiful and truly inspiring. If you imagine a soundtrack to an interstellar space-flight, this would definitely be it. Quite honestly, this might be the finest downtempo ambient electronic album I have ever heard.

After hearing the music in Mirror's Edge, I had to see what this guy was all about. And after listening to a few of Solar Fields' tracks, I proceeded to download his entire discography (seriously). I've always searched for that ambient, spacey sound, but the other ambient albums I've listened to fell short of my expectations. Movements, as wells as Solar Fields' other albums, combines peace and tranquility with motion and purpose. It's ambient music that goes somewhere, takes you someplace, urges you to think, to be introspective. When my friend asked about it, I described it as "space station music." If you buy this cd, I think you'll see for yourself what I'm talking about :)

If you like any sort of electronic music, you will fall in love with this journey. Just slap the headphones on and get ready to cream your pants with juicy sweet audio ecstasy! There's nothing else out there like this....electronic music to the extreme!

I've been a big fan of solar fields since I step into the ambient/down tempo music genre. First heard their work on one of the best compilations of ambient music " The Fahrenheit Project". This album is Awesome (to me at least).

I listen to Movements every night to relax me. I have been amazed at how easily this album transitions from one setting to the next. While making/eating dinner, getting ready for bed, watching sunrise, and engaging in other pleasure-going activities as well. Truly the most versatile, and therefore the most listened to, album that I own at this time.