KEYBOARD   July '96
Review of EnTrance 

by Jim Aikin

No, Virginia: New age music doesn't have to be tame or flabby.  It can be quite stimulating, if you know what you're doing.  What you have to do‹ first, lay down the digital keyboard tracks with a light touch, avoiding obvious chord voicings in favor of suspensions and ambiguities, but never straying too far from the groove.  Add a few acoustic instrument tracks on dumbek, oud, and ney for the world music vibe. Play your sampled percussion sensitively, concentrating on shaker and bongo samples and steering away of the trap set (especially the deadly snare backbeat).  Do a little electronic sound design while you're at it‹ maybe a complex muted trill, or some choir sounds that LFO in and out of the mix in a polyrhythmic pulse.

If you follow these simple, yet elusive, guidelines you might end up with an album as fresh and listenable as EnTrance.  Or maybe Conrad Praetzel has some other tricks up his sleeve that I haven't even noticed yet.  Guess I'll have to take the phone off the hook and listen to the whole album again.