Redshift - Life to Come (2015)

Life to Come is the first full studio recording by Redshift since 2008. All seven tracks were written and performed by Mark Shreeve. Since all the pieces were recorded very close to each other in time there is a more cohesive feel and sound to the album while still pushing the dark and menacing style of electronic music into sharper relief. This is immediately obvious with the first track, "Soft Summer Rain", where the themes and motifs are actually created by the rhythm sequences rather than the more usual lead-lines.

The whole album is heavy with layered sequencing and (very) subsonic bass parts and while there are sometimes familiar sounds present there are also many less obvious choices in instrumentation.

Electronic music (or the "EM factor"), which bases its major structure from the Berlin-school high classic achievement and, mostly, from the typical grandly considered artists of the genre, such as TANGERINE DREAM, SCHULZE and ASHRA, continues a long way into the modern and contemporary phase (and distractions), with a lot of particular changes and new-waves, but mostly with a good definition of synthesizing and ambientizing spiriting up the electronic art and also with solid attitudes of music and composition, that resemble the most evolved, persistant or popular adapted such electronic definitions. REDSHIFT can be considered, with all its Berlin-synthasy, neo-sound and dark ambiance, a band of modern sound and high common groove, having, nevertheless, a deep dish of influences and music arrangements, within the classic or modified electronic ideas and movements.

The founder of REDSHIFT is Mark Shreeve, who in the mid-90s invited Julian Shreeve, Rob Jenkins and James Goddard to a full-adrenaline work of electronic modern sound music and art. Mark Shreeve was already famous by some succesful films scores, plus by a lot of late 80s typical solo projects, filled with ambience and with a sound of strange complexity. The band's sound evolved to use the analogue basic characters with a lot of combined digitality and tech-effects. A lot of live and studio works (done under healthy dreams of discovering and improving/improvising) managed to pull REDSHIFT into popular charts, but also into the experienced and relatively profound EM art spot. Much of the solid sequence, synth and sampling efforts lead to full Berlin-school impressions, though REDSHIFT also compared a lot of modern shrieks and new electronic values. The more progressive nuances arrive when all the influence can include some heavier elements by SCHULZE (instead of some NEU-rock and "kraft" tonalities) or some guitar-work, much like PINK FLOYD in a marooned way.

REDSHIFT finally explores its most lucid art and sound-machine manner through a lot of modern and traditional, atmospherical or cibernetic, analog or digital, sound-sapient or mood-ambitious creation. The biggest styles, chalked by already eight major albums and some extra released material, brings good combinations of dark ambient, cosmic textures, new-atmosphere themes, guitar-keyboard melodism (styled a la E. Froese?), sequential explorations and small experimentalism/abstractionism. There are modern taste reluctancies, like some over-modified music quality or some popular-grown effects (between a dance rhythm and a neo-hallucinant electronic gas), but such moments reflect a lot less than the bright or typical infusions and parallels the band achieves.

Therefore, following the Berlin adaptations, along new constricts and electronic improvements, much like AIRSCULPTURE and FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON, REDSHIFT is an ensemble worthy of being mentioned in progressive electronic's modern, tranquil, but effective music collection.


Tracklist:

1. Soft Summer Rain 10:16
2. Vampyre 11:38
3. Mission Creep 8:47
4. Bloom 5:31
5. Slam 12:58
6. Circling Above 8:25
7. Life To Come 6:12