Museum Of Transient Lights - Dream A Little Dream

Goodness. This is going to be quite a challenge. Five releases from Hong Kong's Trinity Records. Five different projects, from one man. Karsten Hamre. A Man we have featured here before. A man behind Penitent, Dense Vision Shrine, and Arcane Art, to name but a few.

With the romantically and beautifully titled 'Museum of Transient Lights', Karsten teams up with Romanian Lucian Olteanu to deliver an obscure offering. Being the least proficient of all of Karstens related works, there is certainly an element of mystery to this.

Opening track "The Way We Weren't" clocks in at seven minutes - by far the album's shortest track. This track has many elements of classic Darkwave music to it. It begins with slow bass, very reminiscent to the legendary " Sparks" by Faith and the Muse, coupled with slow drums, to make a very traditional and very successful prog-goth sound. A nice change for Karsten, and done surprisingly well. I was raised on several Darkwave bands, and this borrows heavily from a lot of classics, but still manages to have an ambient charm. The entire track plays through a beautiful simplistic bass line, and this could surprisingly become a personal favourite here. Halfway into the album a traditional dark ambient soundwall interlopes, and plays over the bass, to create a fascinating dark ambient/darkwave pairing. Has to be heard to be believed.

"Dream a Little Dream" breaks with tradition here, as this track alone is just under half an hour in length. It carries much more of a dark ambient cycle to it, and in places could easily be filed under Death Industrial. The beautiful darkwave loops are gone, and this is a Museum who's lights are slowly dimming, before fading to iridescent darkness. Some nice infrequent bits of bass and other samples keep this track from becoming redundant, and although it adds nothing new to the genre in anyway shape or form, it isn't a bad piece. Fortunately the track totally breaks off to an upbeat number, before returning to darkwave tendencies.

A Fifteen minute closing ambient opus concludes the album, I won't spoil this for any of you, but it's worth hearing for some fascinating instrumental play towards the end.

Much praise has to be awarded to Lucian Olteanu - the compositions here are very influential and appealing. I would like to hear a lot more from this Romanian.

What can you really say to three tracks and fifty-two minutes in length? This won't be for everyone, but for Karsten Hamre fans, Dreamers, and Idyllic Prophets, you will love this. Oct 30 2006