3.5

Release data:

moonbooter – World of Apes 1
CD, Mellowjet Records, 2010

“World of Apes 1” is a very personal and thought-provoking concept album by Bernd Scholl, aka Moonbooter, addressing the nuclear treat, cold war activities and related themes which keep affecting nowadays global societies and civilization.

On this behalf, I remember similar topics were previously explored by Holle Mangler and Dystopia on their albums “Annihilation On Earth” and “The Second Dawn” respectively.

While spending over a year mapping out appropriate musical sketches of his own for his seventh release, Bernd felt adding actual radiation data and (sampled) historical sound material to the music would make an even more stronger statement.

Despite the heavy theme, the almost 70-minute World of Apes 1 features twelve accessible and contemporary pieces comprising catchy rhythms and fluid melodic lines in which elements of Kraftwerk, Jarre and alike are nicely blended.
In addition, Bernd has come up with some attractive sequencing, especially in the first two tracks. In a way, these pieces made me think of “Acoustic Shadows” by Ron Boots, although they are musically different.

Beside that, I can’t say any of the other tracks is more special or sparkling than the other, they all make up a solid and mature work which is more than pleasant to listen to. The latter is also due to the excellent and transparent sound quality.

All in all, Mr Moonbooter doesn’t make things too hard with his so-called “new-cle-ar” album, which I trust will be liked by the average listener of modern electronic music and beyond.

Website: www.moonbooter.de

You can see what reviews I have done of this artist on the Moonbooter artist page