Electronic music has always been a part of my apples and oranges after delving into the woods of Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra when I read about it in MOJO’s special edition issue on the story of progressive rock. It was my chance to go beyond the big names such as Pink Floyd, Yes, ELP, and Genesis. After hearing Tangerine Dream, CAN, Cluster, Klaus Schulze, and Ash Ra Tempel, my world became full nearly 20 years ago.
There’s a whole other world who fell into the world of the Berlin School of Music by following in the footsteps of the bands and artists that I’ve mentioned. One of them is Texas-based artist Hollan Holmes. Holmes has a very different texture from what he does to keep the tides turning by going back and forth in his atmospheric sounds.
His latest album released on the Spotted Peccary label entitled Sacred Places, is like an imaginative documentary covering the landscape of the lone star state. Each of the compositions that he’s put down, he brings these audible forms to life.
Hollan himself is very much like a film composer, following in the footsteps of Edgar Froese, John Carpenter, Fabio Frizzi, Brad Fiedel’s score to the 1984 sci-fi hit The Terminator, and Goblin. He knows his musical roots very well.
Take for example, ‘Temples of Stone’. Holmes uses this melody over a staccato with pulsating beats, energy-driven guitar lines, the calling of the gods, and delving deeper into the tombs of Egypt to see what kind of mysteries lay ahead. ‘Bristlecone’ sounds like a 16-bit video game score from Sega Genesis as Hollan travels back to the early 1990s by creating music for the franchise, Ecco The Dolphin with under watery vibrations.
But it’s ‘An Elevated Life’ that puts you right in the middle of a futuristic scenery of Berlin in the late ‘70s where the music begins to thrive. It has an arpeggiated sound, plus Bill Porter’s hefty guitar work, comes into the picture channeling Froese’s fret work by travelling to the bright, bright lights of the cities in all of its glory, ready to take in some action and then back onto the train to head on home.
When I think of ‘The Divine Connection’ I think of a drive down the Stratosfear sessions and revisiting the hallucinated images that begin to come out of nowhere with unexpected sequences that become a nightmarish pattern coming over the horizon before entering the lairs of Schulze’s Ohr years with ‘Primal Instinct’.
I vision Holmes not only using the heavy percussion’s on this track, but using a string quartet with double-tracking effects by putting you right in the middle of this dangerous path that begins to unravel. It’s a scary piece of work that’ll send shivers down your spine, not knowing when the danger starts coming towards you in a nanosecond.
Yes, this does have a lot of the landscapes behind the lone star state that Hollan envisions, but boy, he can take it up a notch when it comes to pushing the envelope even further. Sacred Places may not be for the faint of heart, but it can grab you very quickly once the wildfire starts to spread like crazy.
And once it spreads, you’ll have an understanding on why Holmes isn’t joking around.
