PERCUTONE

Christian Richet "Percutone", 1998, opens up with "To be continued" a super cool percussive driven riff, more in tune with be-bop Jazz crossed with Chick Corea/Jan Hammer styled synths, some distant electric guitar solos and his "nuevas musicas" styling. The flashy opener demands a slow paced follow up.

"Umaoi", track 2, resembles a slow/mid paced electronic, percussive, modern/primitive religious like procession tainted with a howling "cat in heat"like electric guitar, counterpointing the very attractive melody line and its "sacred" atmosphere components. It still amazes me how influential Michael Cretu's ENIGMA became on the long run, and this track is not absent of that.

"Before Day", track 3, follows the same kid of path but in a more experimental and scattered manner. Even with its charms this piece stays short of its elder siblings creative standards.

Track 4- "And the face said" is an atmospheric, minimalist, "darker" trip. Its mysterious nature works wonders in this album's context. Although this piece is not that astounding as other musician's "dark/drone" experiments, it is well written and achieves the hypnotic quality required but also their predictability.

"Percutone" the closing track, is more experimental in its composition, taking brief sections of some previous tracks and "remixing" them with a less firm hand focus, therefore its free floating, dramatic epic-like "closing" track quality.

All in all, some highly creative musical ideas and new proposals yet not quiet that frequent or consistent throughout the whole album.

***3 PA stars.