“I’m very sensible about sounds and atmospheres. Mostly, I’m just playing around a bit, creating sounds on guitar and keyboard. I get inspired through the sounds. That’s where the fun is – to start from nowhere and not knowing where you’ll be going”. That’s Jerome Froese describing on how he views the music on his latest release Sunsets in Stereo to Anil Prasad’s website Music Without Borders: Innerviews this year and how he counteracts the negativity that’s going on with the world right now.
It’s hard to imagine that Jerome has been in the music business for 35 years. Surrounded by synthesisers, tape machines and his father’s legacy, Jerome wants to make sure that he has kept the spiritual guidance and the Berlin School of Music to a standstill, making sure his father Edgar is watching over him, and guiding him to see where the influence stands the test of time.
With his new album Sunsets in Stereo, it is a very powerful and emotional process that describes the beauty, the mystery, and the wonder in what Jerome has brought to the table. While the music has Froese’s method as “guitartronica”, where he uses his guitar not just as an instrument, but with heavy effects, delays, and making it sound like synths coming out of the speakers.
“My goal was to create my own sound”. Froese explains to Prasad, “My first album Neptunes from 2005 sounds a lot more like the things I did with Tangerine Dream than Sunsets in Stereo. That’s because I’ve been experimenting and learning the whole time. There are so many interesting new gadgets coming out almost every day. Many are incredibly interesting and I add them to my sound”.
And that’s what Sunsets in Stereo is, a vision of what the future will bring in for the next century to see the technology and what people go through in the modern world to give it that big, gigantic push. ‘Hope’ opens the album with a beautiful illustration of dreamy electric guitars, acoustic raindrops, female vocalizations, and synth-like textures to fill the void by witnessing the sun rising across the German landscape for citizens to begin a new day in their normal lives.
I wouldn’t compare it to early Floyd, because that’s would be too much of a cop-out, but there are some elements of their music flowing into view with a bit of Goldfrapp thrown in there from their Felt Mountain period while the brutal kick in the gut on ‘The Clock That Forgot Time’ goes deeper into the new wave/post-punk-era of the late ‘70s, early ‘80s.
Here, Jerome walks into the Hyperborea-era of TD’s 1983 album, the last one on Virgin Records before they jumped ship to Jive Electro, known as the Blue Year-era. You feel the synths and guitars walking into this techno-advantage where it begins to drill in its floating atmosphere and setting up the time machine Jerome has in store for the listener to go back in time where the Krautrock scene was about to ride high and get you ready for the adventure of a lifetime.
But on ‘Flowers and Skywriters’ and ‘Lemonade Clouds’, Jerome himself has written this track as an alternative rock point of view recorded back in the ‘90s, an uplifting psychedelia approach which would have made Porcupine Tree to put lyrics on the composition as ‘Feel Your Ghosts’ goes from the rain-dripping film-noir effect to the pure fiery sounds of metallic crunches like a blaze of fire, spreading across the galaxy.
That’s how incredible Jerome really is. He wants to prove himself that he’s more than just a member of Tangerine Dream, but more by breaking all of the chains and freeing himself to give carte blanche on his instrument and sail across the stars to the milky way in our solar system. Hearing ‘Blow the Fuse, Ignore the Galaxy’, it’s like Jerome has brought in the 8-bit sound from Nintendo and making his own video game score like a massive tidal wave, ready to hit you in a nanosecond.
‘Endless Sympathy’ which closes the album, showcases his full circle motif by dedicating it to his father, knowing he has made peace with him. You feel the loneliness, the walk across the empty street in an empty city, and its keys and ambiance, gives you a full detail on what happens next in the years and months to come in the 2020s.
