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Excellent album from Finnish synthesizer duo playing instrumental music full of pictorial atmospherics, infectious melodies and flowing rhythmic currents!
‘Gigaherz’ is one hell of an album of brilliantly constructed/played electronic music that covers a vast area of styles and sounds and brings them into a wholesome, imaginative, inventive work that all “EM” fans will enjoy big time!
The CD comes in a nicely presented Card Digi-Pak that includes a 16-Page Booklet.
Hailing from Finland, NEMESIS’s core members Ami Hassinen and Jyrki Kastman started their musical adventures from very basic beginnings back in their schooldays of 1987, after being ‘overdosed’ with astronomy, sci-fi, HAWKWIND and TANGERINE DREAM.
Their first break came in 1994 when the first NEMESIS album: ‘Xcelsior’ was released. In 1996 they produced a work for Finnish Radio called: ‘Evolution’ (the ‘Evolution Suite’ on this album includes several remixes and/or re-recorded sections of it). In 1997 their 2nd album ‘Cyberiad’ was released – a retro work for friends of Moog and Mellotron sounds, and at the end of the millennium their 3rd, ‘Sky Archeology’ – an album “dedicated to carbon based life forms, on Earth and elsewhere” was released. All these albums were praised in the press and on the net.
The core of NEMESIS music has always included the key elements of melody, atmosphere and landscape.
In composing they use a lot of collective improvisation – a method related to the one the legendary CAN used in the 1970’s.
NEMESIS has always strived for a sound that is fresh and up-to-date, but timeless at the same time; to play music in which different styles and genres layer and dissolve effortlessly together… soundscapes where the past decades of electronic music shake hands with modern technology… atmospheres, where the analogic sounds radiate the warmth of human touch… stories, where the soundworlds resonate with the familiar background noise emanating from the collective memory of the musicnauts…
‘Gigaherz’ is compiled from material mostly composed in 1996-97, but the recordings are from 2007.
The music on the album gives a good indication of the current course on NEMESIS in soundspace at that time: the co-ordinates were set, the strong pulses taking the listener spiralling towards the event horizon and occasionally, gravity seemed to release its steely grip. NEMESIS brings together what is best in the expanding musical world in the new millennium: the new pulse of the ageless machine music, ambience, psychedelia and the progressive touch of the pioneers of the 70’s; the geometry of the starlit skies, quantum physics of sound, the noise of the distant nebulas, the short history of time itself…
Adapted from the sleeve notes of Jukka Mikkola: Journalist, Producer and Space Commander - KLE Finland.
All tracks were recorded in 2012 by the NEMESIS line-up of…
Ami Hassinen (digital & analog synths / violin on track 7),
Jyrki Kastman (analog & digital synths / sampling / effects / electric sitar on track 2) and
Joni Virtanen (soft synths & hard keyboards / sampling / effects / kantele on track 1).
Here is the CDS Towers view of NEMESIS, together with our track-by-track review of ‘Gigaherz’…
NEMESIS make a brilliantly constructed, inventive, semi-improvised brand of top-quality electronic music; an amazing blend of atmospheres and strong melody coupled with flowing rhythmic currents and grooves that are a new take on the “Berlin School” way of thinking, but are none-the-less just as addictive and have a great feel.
This is a melding of composed/improvised synth music designed to evoke images and take you into new and different worlds of the imagination!
Psychedelic Prog fans might also notice a familiar name in the band line-up… Ami Hassinen, the keyboards player from another Finnish band that are big news at CDS Towers right now: MOONWAGON.
There are parts of this album where the plateaus on which the Synth, Psych and Prog genres reside are almost bridged, because that are some seriously hot spaced-out passages of amazing instrumental sound going on, and it’s a these points where MOONWAGON and NEMESIS almost get close to each other!
‘Gigaherz’ track–by–track…
After an atmospheric intro of rainfall and cosmic winds, ‘Kopernikus’ quickly kick starts a base rhythmic flow followed by added real Mellotron choirs and synth melodies that build into a really nice groove, with swirling psychedelic currents flying all around the soundstage. An addictive high-register synth melody flows in just after the four-minute mark, followed by a fluid electric piano riff and another superb higher-register synth melody that really takes off and flies into the heavens under a bubbling cauldron of synthesizer effects and ever-spiralling textures. After the rhythms calmly disappear over the horizon, the synth melodies also disperse and head on out into space, dipping and diving through the atmosphere before disappearing in clouds of bubbling, spiralling effects and cross-over into…
‘Gigaherz’ - a melodic/dynamic tour-de-force that comes straight in with a big riff and melody line soaring over a whole host of Mellotron sounds, percussion and loads of synth effects. It’s all a bit like the OZRIC TENTACLES meets Harold Faltermeyer meets DEPECHE MODE as the strong melodic forces drive at some speed into a kind of synth jam packed full of exciting sounds and infectious rhythms. The track closes as the main theme rockets off into space over a passage of ethereal Mellotron textures that provide a fitting end to eight minutes of genuine dynamic, modern synth music excitement!
‘Karyon’ comes in to the sound of a repeated sonar bleep, closely followed by a pulsing synth rhythm overlaid with a beautifully dreamy, almost FLOYD/Gilmour-esque electric guitar theme. This is accompanied by a constantly building layer of keyboard textures and rhythms, then after a couple of minutes, a break in the rhythm allows expansive echoed keyboard sounds to create a vast new panoramic view amid a backdrop of pulsating synth sounds and flying effects.
‘Vertical Horizons’ opens to a scene where deep multiple synth tones form the sound imagery of some kind of colony of birds or animals of some description positioned on a desolate alien landscape, with sounds piercing and soft, large and small, rippling and static, all helping form a threatening, kaleidoscopic, powerhouse of sounds that are shooting and spiralling all over the place in a frantic display of colour and sound.
‘Nautilus’ comes in on a metallic, chain-like clanking rhythm, following by a mass of echoed, cascading synth riffs from all corners of the soundstage. A huge synth melody breaks out and blossoms amid massive waves of keyboard effects, followed by a psychedelic effect that sounds like synthesizers being squeezed through a wah-wah effects pedal! The track regimentally builds up a huge wall of melodic sound that starts to slowly disperse just after the six minute mark, where new layers of almost fluid-like, crystalline synth textures form a vision of hundreds of tiny icicles falling all around – Great stuff!
‘Return To The Well’ opens with a slow, but strong cavernous synth rhythm and a fluid lead melody line set upon a backdrop of faint electric bird and grasshopper-like sounds. The melody-line is joined by hazy ethereal choral sounds and a soft brassy accented synth that is just captivating in the extreme, with other background effects, all-adding to the gradually building sonic picture. A beautiful soprano synth sound (not voice) starts to drift high in the heavens amidst echoed sounds and distant psych-soaked synth swirls, then a electric guitar steeped in misty electronic textures solemnly soars skywards before being shrouded in a hail of cascading high-register synth showers and soft Mellotron/organ chords.
‘The Evolution Suite’ starts with ‘The First Sea’ and it’s a cavernous atmospheric intro with distant whispering synth sounds circling above and around, like sea-birds hovering around a food source. Ethereal angelic voices emerge into the picture and the piece evolves into a stunning passage of space music with huge waves of sweeping space synths coming and going in regal cosmic grandeur, then cross-fading into…
‘Origin Of The Species’, a link track that opens in a water world of aquatic sounds and electronic sea creature effects that crosses-over into…
‘Terra Firma’ which opens in a gorgeous sea of choral voices and other synth textures, with sporadic deep bursts of percussion and other effects. After a couple of minutes, a beautiful melody line emerges from the misty backdrop and a faster paced rhythm gradually kicks in to drive the track along at a new, faster paced direction.
The melody line works its way round the patterns formed by the rhythmic flow over a calming bed of soft Mellotron-like textures, before spiralling off to a final conclusion and cross-fading into…
‘Koobi Fora’, which opens to the sound of some massive metallic lid being screwed off of an equally massive container (a bit like the part in Jeff Wayne’s ‘War Of The Worlds’ where the first spaceship starts opening), then moves straight into a swell of cosmic synthesizer textures and melodies with a pulsating rhythm that is hypnotic in its construction, maintaining drive and purpose from start to finish, then crosses-over into…
‘Meander’ with chinking, bottle-like sounds providing the intro, then a hazy mist of synthesizers and echoed effects take-over, followed by all manner of clanking sounds and eerie special effects that lead into… ‘Out Of The Cradle’, which is even weirder with all manner of alien like sounds and textures creating a frenzied scene of a frightening alien world, before moving over into…
‘Final Frontier’, were space winds and abstract synth sounds start to build a formidable backdrop scene for a new rhythm and psychedelic synth / organ based passage to open out and gradually develop and grow into an infectious “Berlin-School” style rhythmic flow that’s both cosmic and psychedelic, with melody lines and special effects coming together head-on in a delicious brew of Synth/Psychedelic soup and heading on into…
‘Coldfront’, another short atmospheric link track that sounds like a cross between a helicopter and a high-speed underwater, then swiftly into the final part of the ‘The Evolution Suite’: ‘Last Footprints’, which is basically a chilly cosmic wind which stays for the two minute duration and closes the album in a wave of atmospheric brilliance!
Also available by NEMESIS: LIVING STATUES - Stock # 1609685
NEMESIS: GIGAHERZ Track List:
01. Kopernikus (9:20)
02. Gigaherz (8:04)
03. Karyon (6:57)
04. Vertical Horizons (5.18)
05. Nautilus (7:54)
06. Return To The Well (7:18)
Evolution Suite:
07. The First Sea (5:00)
08. Origin Of The Species (1:47)
09. Terra Firma (8:08)
10. Koobi Fora (5:02)
11. Meander (2:35)
12. Out Of The Cradle (1:26)
13. Final Frontier (5:28)
14. Coldfront (0:27)
15. Last Footprints (2:03)
TPT – 76:52