eMusic Review 0
The title of Markus Guentner's debut album translates as "in minor," but while the music is accordingly hushed, even somber, the record's hardly an unmitigated brood. Like Dettinger, Guentner (who bills himself as "the inventor of pop ambient") revels in sensuous washes of sound, whipping sampled drones, airy synthesizers, brushed percussion and bell tones into billowing shapes. That all the album's tracks, like those on Dettinger's Intershop, are untitled shouldn't surprise; Guentner's ephemeral forms are abstract in the extreme, and if it's tempting to compare them to the Aurora Borealis, or the green flash of the setting sun, Guentner's refusal to tether the music to anything specific adds to their air of reverie. Only one cut, the second, hews to the boom-tick beat that's so central to Kompakt's techno aesthetic; the rest of the album rolls with a pulse as subtle as the tide.
