James McKeown, also known as Hawksmoor, comes out swinging. Following it up to last year’s album Telepathic Heights, he takes listeners back into the world of the Kosmische Musik scene that he had grown up listening to, ranging from CAN, NEU, Harmonia, Cluster, and fellow post-punk heroes Devo into the middle with the release of Oneironautics on the Soul Jazz label.
Listening to Oneironautics, you feel as if you’re in a dream. What James wanted to do is to set out and find more ideas that are flowing his way upwards. There’s a sense of these hypnotic and ambient textures from what is shown throughout the visions of Hawksmoor.
He puts listeners into this chugging space voyage which is evidential behind the bass pump throughout ‘Glass Teeth’ that seers through Kraftwerk’s Autobahn-era, with futuristic qualities that’ll make your jaw drop at the right moment before taken aback by elements of De Wolfe music with a hypnotic, meditated trance on ‘Galadali’.
Elsewhere, he heads off into the Tropicalia sun in the heart of Brazil with a moody, yet bossa-nova vibe in ‘Traumzeit’. Coolness, relaxing, and warming up in the hot-less summer in the middle of July, the heat puts you through a hydrated atmosphere to watch the sunsetting as evening approaches.
‘A Forest in the Sky’ morphs into Gilmour’s arrangements of the 3-part suite ‘The Narrow Way’ from his Ummagumma years. Droning orientations, folky landscapes, and Vangelis-like soundscapes, McKeown knows his place when it comes to walking into their territories.
There’s more from where that came from and the Hawksmoor journey keeps on continuing by proving that he’s ready to take the mantle and carry on the legacy of where his fellow krautrock and Electronic maestros have left for him to keep their spirits alive.
