Search - Arno Peeters :: Aeroson

Intelligent comments on modern technology

Leendert Douma | The Netherlands | 04/19/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Like Stockhausen in the fifties and Brian Eno in the late seventies/early eighties, Arno Peeters developed a whole new way of putting a musical score on paper. But where Stockhausen and Eno just created new symbols for the musical notes, Arno Peeters goes two steps further by using `ink stains' and colours to indicate the various moods of Aeroson. Thus the musical score for Aeroson is also a visual piece of art. Although Aeroson is released in 1997, it's clearly an album for the 21st century. The music does not refer to any old 20th century musical style, which is unique in a time where most artists fall back on the past. Instead of traditional songstructures or boring ambient sounds, Arno Peeters presents us a `lecture' on the effects of sounds on the human mind. So we hear fax-machines and printers, all kinds of telephone bells, computer-games, nature- and native sounds, voices in various exotic languages and even commercials for rocket-missiles! To indicate the loneliness in modern communication we hear in AudEntity II answering machines and unavailable telephone numbers. In Meditation we hear at the same time some glorious music and a man desperately screaming for help. It all gave me the creeps. But the world of Arno Peeters is not a happy world. He gives us his critical and intelligent comments on modern technology. Some are scary, some are hopeful and some are humorous. At the end of the trip we here some old moviestar giving away a cliché moral: "There is hope, but it has to come from inside. From man himself."Aeroson is a landmark in electronic music, like for instance Kraftwerk's Computer World in 1981. Both albums deal with the relationship between man and the technology around him. The difference is that Aeroson is not `pleasant music'. It's certainly no background- or ambient music in its traditional sense. But the intelligent view on modern technology is a nice change in today's world of electronic bubblegum."