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New Green Clear Blue - 1989 Private Music
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Produced, composed, and engineered by Dan Hartman. Recorded at Multi Level. All songs © Second Nature Music, Inc/SBK April Music Inc. (ASCAP). Management: Danny Goldberg. Special thanks to Vangelis Papathanassiou, Harold Budd and Richard Harries, Jr. for musical and personal inspiration, NYC; all at Green Street Recording Studios; Amanda Stone and Andrew derrick Design, London; Dana Millman and all at Gold Spaceship and at Private Music. "The subconscious mind is a powerful world possessing experiences and feelings we don not necessarily recognise in our daily movements; but nonetheless they influence our entire lives. The tones and shades in this collection were performed live and intuitively for the purpose of opening channels by which the listener may visit their own subconscious" - Dan Hartman.
Review material (source unknown, but from a UK record review magazine). Yes, it's Disco Dan the Tina Turner production man, but he sounds uncannily like Brian Eno and Harold Budd. Indeed, the credits include thanks to Budd and, a tad more surprisingly, Vangelis, for "musical and personal inspirations". The Vangelis connection may lie in Hartman's basic approach - he recorded these pieces "live and intuitively" as does that inscrutable Greek maestro. There's certainly little in the way of Vangelis-like artifice or melodic development, but much that brings to mind Budd's sublimely drifting, charming constructions. Hartman builds layer upon layer of gauzy synthesizer wash, cavernous echoes intermingled with distant thunder and enlivened by simple Satie-like piano tinklings. Finally, he introduces what Eno calls "singularities", aural events which occur only once or twice in a piece, but which serve as lenses enabling the mind's eye to focus more sharply on his mist-hung musical landscapes. Beautiful. **** Johnny
Black http://www.bondegezou.demon.co.uk/reviews/recorded/ngcb.htm Dan Hartman is better known as a dance producer, co-writing hits like Black Box's "Ride on Time" and working with Holly Johnson, but here is another side to Hartman. _New Green/clear blue_ is ambient but not New Age, with a sense of unease to what should be relaxing. The result is melancholy, perhaps reminiscent of Vangelis' music for "Blade Runner", but with a more abstract use of sound. The choice of 'Cold War' titles like "Soviet Nights" and "Scaramanga" or the more general "Hope of No End" add to the foreboding. The result is worthy of attention in the opening piece, "Sigh of Relief". Sadly, the rest of the album does not work as well as its beginning: some comes across as superfluous to me, although I am not generally an aficionado of the more ambient scene. Unlike pieces like "Romance" or "The Swan", later pieces may lack a sense of completeness or resolution. There is some use of repeating themes throughout the album, but you must be in the right mood to pick up on them. Tangerine Dream's Peter Baumann guests, mixing "Scaramanga" and performing 'ambient treatment' on "The Swan". The results, however, are hard to distinguish from Hartman's own work. On the other hand, Hartman gives a distinct Tangerine Dream undercurrent to "Alpha Waves". Henry Potts, 31.3.97 |
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