- ARTIST: Joshua Van Tassel
- TITLE: Dance Music volume II: More Songs for Slow Motion
- CAT#: BKWRD021
- FORMAT: Digital
- RELEASE DATE: September 11, 2020
Like the instrument that inspired it, the Ondes Martenot, Van Tassel’s Dance Music volume II is elegant and expressive, the score to a movie inside your head.
The Ondes Martenot (OHND mar-tə-NOH) is an elegantly intricate, deliberately complicated hand-built machine that lives with the theremin as one of the world’s earliest electronic instruments (c.1928). Its inventor, the cellist Maurice Martenot, was a radio operator in WWI and wanted to duplicate the accidental overlaps of tones between radio oscillators, but with the expressiveness and emotion of cello. The Ondes is a rare collectible now, but there is an option in the Ondea: Itself an exclusive membership, they’re Ondes modernized by Calgary’s David Kean.
Van Tassel, no stranger to concepts and themes, made the first Dance Music, 2014’s Songs For Slow Motion, as a gift for his dancer wife to play in her sessions as a craniosacral therapist.
“meditative meditative, shifting chords, like sand reshaped by wind” – Aquarium Drunkard
“elegant and expressive, the score to a movie inside your head” – Headphone Commute
“if you’re able to lose yourself in Van Tassel’s compositions for even a few minutes, you’ll feel a bit lighter” – CBC Music
“peaceful” – John Schaefer, WNYC’s New Sounds
“undiluted gorgeousness” – PopMatters
“powerful” – Magnetic Mag
“a beautifully album for ugly times” (9.5/10) – Higher Plain Music
“meditative, focused, and pure” – Surviving the Golden Age
“as soothing as ASMR” – The Coast
“a real gift” – Tom Allen, CBC Radio
“gradual and mesmerizing, leaning into the idea of sound in slow motion.” – The Road To Sound
“stylistic and visionary” (8/10) – Exclaim!
“a masterpiece” – Deepest Currents
“nothing short of gorgeous” – HearFeel
“that type of an album that you just keep on pressing the repeat button on and on. Particularly very, very late at night.” – Echoes & Dust
“geradezu hochgeistiger, üppig produzierter Musik voller Strahlkraft.” – unter ton
