MUSIC FOR THE TACTILE DOME

Jonas Reinhardt, being a group that attempts only the retro sound, doesn't really bring a lot of anything new to electronic music. Music for the Tactile Dome is composed entirely of vintage sounding synths and powerful acoustic percussion, and mostly sounds like a watered- down and cloudier version of what Zombi have been doing for the past decade.

All of the tracks on this album have the "smoke-filled room" atmosphere to them because of the cloudy production. The analog synth sound on this album will definitely feel comfortable to older fans of this type of music, but Jonas Reinhardt isn't adding anything interesting or new to the mix, which is the only reason why this sound works so well for other artists such as Boards of Canada who also use vintage analog synth sound. Each track, being anywhere from 3 to 6 minutes in length, don't really have enough room to develop. This wouldn't be a problem if each track fed off of its preceding track in a "continuous song" kind of format, but each track is singular and undeveloped, resulting in 9 tracks of retro meandering.

Because Jonas Reinhardt has been making this type of music for a few years now, the group should by now be more comfortable in exploring what possible greatness this type of sound can offer. The comfort zone here has been worn out for decades, and has even been done way better than this album has. This isn't a bad album, and I'd definitely recommend it to fans of this genre that want something that is at least modern (as in recorded and released recently), but for the rest of us who want something a bit more engaging and creative, we should listen to Jonas Reinhardt's more interesting contemporaries such as the aforementioned Zombi or Boards of Canada.