Found at: http://trance.net/article/articleprint/270/-1/29/
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SOL (feat. Antonia Langesdorf) "Stardust"
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Top level
Music reviews
Chill out/ambient reviews
SOL (feat. Antonia Langesdorf) "Stardust" (Fax, PS 08/99)
1. Stardust (Club Mix)
2. Time & Space
3. Venus
4. Moon 44
5. Stardust (Elektro Mix)
6. Everybody
7. Cosmic Lines
8. Planet X
9. Everybody (Vocal Mix)
Remember those glorious days of the early 90's, when "trance" wasn't a dirty word, when Paul van Dyk was good, when the Eye Q and MFS labels were churning out top quality gear and melodic dance music didn't equal cheese? Well, Christian Schek and Ramin Naghachian remember it all too well, and since they were actually part of the scene when it happened, you can't really blame them, can you? Most producers of that era have "moved on" (i.e. disappeared from the scene, or reinvented themselves as makers of very boring music), but these two haven't – musically, they're still stuck in 1993. Mr. Schek I don't know much about, but Ramin was a hot producer in those days, with some bona fide classics under his belt in the Afrotrance guise (remember "Spiritual Energy" on Harthouse?) as well as some pretty good slabs of smooth commercial dance music on Logic. This album is a tribute to that long gone trance sound (or at least that's what I think is the intention), so if you're up for a nostalgia fix, this might be what you need. Personally I find it very boring though. On this album, they dish out nine heavily string-laden tunes that are so squeaky clean and at times so grandiose that it gets a bit too sugary sweet for this reviewer, and the whole thing feels quite dated and irrelevant nowadays. This record does have a certain charm, and it's pretty well put together, but at the same time, it's very anodyne and cliche-ridden (not to the same degree as your average Euro-cheese record though), and the tunes are simply not very memorable. And those track titles... Anyway, despite some good moments, this is a most unremarkable CD that does little to revive the greatness of the old trance sound – the intentions are good, but ultimately, this is an insubstantial, and unnecessary, album that sounds like an average Frankfurt Beat release from ten years ago. Hunt down one of the Eye Q compilation albums instead.
