Kees Aerts Slices of Time

The opening two pieces of this album serve as short introductions to the album, before track 3 ‘Eire’ gets proceedings officially underway. A pleasing rhythm emerges followed by a suitably tinged melody, however it’s a fairly lightweight motif which offers little in the way of longevity. ‘Balance’ is a much more robust and meaningful outing, with rhythmics and rasping sequences dominating. ‘Darkness’ follows the rhythm focussed style with complex patterns overlaid with subtle elongated pads. Latterly the main theme becomes more prevalent and it’s an enjoyable piece. ‘The First Time’ is a fairly inconspicuous chugger, however ‘Travel’ presents some impressive sequence lines to open though again the melody is rather inconspicuous and watered down. Each piece is annotated with Kees’s comments on the sleeve, and the next track is accompanied by “...We use less than 10% of our brain. Does the other 90% know the answer?”. Well, I’m taxing my 10% to the full here to try and work out which is the next track - it’s a 1:50 track which I presume is ‘Lovers (Cooldown Mix)’ - but it’s listed out of sequence in the booklet and on the rear sleeve. It’s fairly insignificant anyway, so onto ‘Other Worlds’ which is a more interesting piece with busy sequences presented as a series of sections. ‘Friends’ (the longest piece at 9:45) builds carefully on laid back sequencing towards a well pitched main theme. It has that feeling of winding down, but it is left to a reprise of the title track to close the album - including vocal sample treatments which sounded interesting in the early days of the Fairlight, but now sound very dated. Overall this album rarely excites and simply doesn’t do enough to set it apart from the crowd.(GG)

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