PONDSKATER - BALANCE (LP)

"Experimental Music. Music with experiments. From the mind for the gut. Your gut gets affected a lot during the 38 minutes of this remarkable album. Restlessness is evoked. It is disturbing with its cold energy and its unfolding abstract sound layers. These compositions evoke questions: Has balance been lost and should be re-established? Or is it all about finding the right way of balance for a very first time? Is there any fruitless kind of balance, that should be undone? Which price is to pay, which effort to make defending balance against those unsteady forces that threaten it? The eight tracks of the album give answers to these questions. They all are created with an obstinacy, that has yet been typical for Pondskater's earlier projects. "Balance" is an excentric and wilful orbiter inside the Düsseldorf electronic galaxy. Pondskakter's tunes are puristic, cold and surprisingly little hesitant to make references to Düsseldorf pioneers Kraftwerk and abandon them at the next moment. The most startling moments of the record, however, are both its humour and melancholy that radiate through all the pieces. Pondskater has managed to create an extraordinary coherence of both. "Balance" has a strange sparkle around it, seeding an impression that lasts after repeated listening: It is the fascinating sparkle of an ice-blue coloured piece of jigsaw against the larger background of contemporary electronic music." (label info) debut album by Düsseldorf based electronic music producer Pondskater aka Axel Ganz