Artists: Markus Reuter / Zero Ohms
Album:
The Sun Is Just The Sun, But The Stars They Call The Heavens

Released: 28 March 2011
Label: DiN/DDL

The Sun Is Just The Sun, But The Stars They Call The Heavens
With their release The Sun Is Just The Sun, But The Stars They Call The Heavens (67'42") touch guitarist Markus Reuter and multi-instrumentalist Zero Ohms (a.k.a. Richard Roberts) intersect their parallel careers in collaborating and colluding. Each have earned a healthy reputation through their own work, and are known equally well for making music with another. For Reuter it is the likes of Ian Boddy, Robert Rich and Tim Motzer while with Roberts it is Brannan Lane, Craig Padilla and Skip Murphy. On The Sun is Just the Sun... Roberts and Reuter realize an interesting album spanning the pleasant flute possessed soundscapes on CDs by Zero Ohms and the breathing dreamy drones and distinctively odd dissonance of Reuter's musical expressions. Their teaming together features a wonderful sense of sonic innovation. Throughout the listening experience a complexity of sounds merge and separate, leaving the listener with the impression of a landscape in motion. A few tracks contain straight field recordings skimming a stratum of consonant harmonies - effectively juxtaposing this music's sense of interiority with the immensity of the outside world. Such communication can be commended for its directness. Other areas become the occasion for reflections of form and space, as mild yet mysterious discord causes tension and anomalous melodies distend across an illimitable distance. Both dramatically dynamic and incredibly subtle, The Sun is Just the Sun... is no disruptive, disorienting soundtrack for a world in crisis. This music is a demonstration that, even in the midst of a hostile and often uncivilized world, humankind continues the fight to create beauty.

- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END   19 May 2011


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