This recording is special . Twenty person band led by his young music commander Daniel Glatzel takes us on the cosmic crusade. All related to this band has a taste of the great adventure. Starting with cosmic graphic art in the booklet through titles of the compositions to the final climax . All written by a 25 year old leader. Music here is played with a manical devotion and with the greatest fun in the same time. You can feel this delight with every single note. It is very impressive as we are dealing here with a serious musical erudition mixed mischievously with very specific sense of humour.
Its for sure that all these youngsters did their homework well. Opening Gamma Pluto Delta is a very psycho-motoric tune running on the locomotive like beat and keeping us in readiness for whatever is going to happen. Listener is finding himself immediately mobilised and ready to follow those chaps.
Following Asteroids with crazy mixed tempos, changing endlessly, employs in arrangement everything from the Big Bands history . Starting from the ballroom like dancing tunes, then with strings added on the top to smooth the path when needed ,to the individual brass solos ,both written and improvised. Slowing down on the end leaving us to hang on in space awaiting the next step.
Lava Lovers after that swings gently decorated by a smooth ride of cellos on the top of the calypso beat. Once we believe we started to discover something new ,the band proves us wrong and immediately turns the opposite direction. Bringing back memories of almost forgotten lapidary tunes decorating class B movies alike. Eventually television advertisement or fragments of serious 20 century music, but broken into little pieces and reconstructed back in the way that makes them hardly recognisable and impossible to name. The culmination of such a practise is Radioactive People , middle tune taking us to the Galactic Circus of Madness.
Following Scene 3 is slowing down just in time as there is not as many listeners capable to handle such an intensity. Band swing us gently now, on the harp riff taken from Debussy and bridged with lovely brass tapestry to the well anchored vibraphone rhythmic bypass. The Space Trip goes on! Until Cotton Candy Nebula group improvisation. This piece shows a collective maturity of the band. They keep their ranks tight. Minimal concept of the piece brings memories of Glass and Sun Ra. In response ,following Milky Way Fables with its Cage like structure and sparkling brass glissandos flying over the loops is pumping up with the speed making our ears ringing.
But again – there is a brake in the middle and we are landing gently on the parachute build by sonic circles of the moving pipes. Closing Postludium announces an arrival and the end of the trip. A landing does not disappoint at all. I love this new place we came too. But all memories of the journey are still alive in my head .