Moanerman

Name: Ray Van Mechelen
Home Page: http://www.peternorth.com or http://myspace.com/cocabots
Member Since: May 17, 2004
Rank: 333
Average Vote Received: Correct (3.80, 10 votes)
Rated 4301 releases, average: 4.34
Location: Earth, Belgium
Profile: Born in 1980, dj, collector and a difficult person.

I'm a big fan of Katrien Klausing, if you have old tapes with chill-out gigs, please contact me.

Always a pleasure to meet new musicfreaks so drop me a line :p

Interests: electronic music, reading, the 80's, David Lynch, space-art and women, duh!

I also have a second wantlist for italo-disco right here: Italo-Moaner

Preferences: Blonde or brunette, it doesn`t matter, as long as they look good. But also: Ambient, Acid, Italo Disco, Uncomfortable Electronics, Experimental, Synth-Pop, Techno, Electro, Old synth sounds like the Juno, Moog, Jupiter etc... And not to forget: since my childhood years I fell in love with the sound of the TR808, music would never be the same without it...

PS: do never, and I mean NEVER, ask me for mp3's, that's insulting. Buy your music instead.

Seller Rating:

100.0% positive (28 ratings)

Buyer Rating: 100.0% positive (420 ratings)

Moanerman's groups (8)

Reviews:

Wicked Messenger - Vision Rites And Techniques Of Ecstasy - 01-Nov-09 02:10 PM
This is one of these albums that really needed to grow on me. I thought it was "good" the first time I heard it but after listening to it more and more I realized that this is a true masterpiece. Yes, its in the same vein of the rest of the Plague catalogue, which means dark ambience and drones but yet it is different. This is something Plague Recordings keeps succeeding in every time: releasing dark ambient but always from a new and unique angle.

To me, Vision Rites And Techniques Of Ecstasy is an ancient story about cult and rituals, very mysterious and dark rituals. The atmosphere feels very desolate. While listening to this you think about ruins, the ancient Maya cult but you never get a bright or clear image of it, everything is woven into that dusty, vague and mysterious atmosphere.

The track "Ritual Trance" is the point where that atmosphere captures me the most. That whispering-like sound feels very ethereal but also very desolate and far away in the time spectrum. Its hard to explain what it evokes. It reminds me of the sound and vibe that you hear in Deathprods "Dead Peoples Things" from the album Morals And Dogma.

Vision Rites And Techniques Of Ecstacy is definitely Wicked Messengers most intense and best work to date. It needs it’s time to tell its story but once it captures you, there is no way back. An absolutely stunning ambient masterpiece.

Starfish Pool - 24-Jun-09 02:27 AM
Starfish Pool’s music was the sound of my puberty, I can’t say it in a better way. As a 14 years old kid I had a really hard time at home: struggle between my parents, searching for an own identity, bored at school, questioning myself, exploring the sense of life etc. Starfish Pool’s music was the soundtrack for that period in my life. PS: everything ended up well with me :-)

I still remember the moment I discovered his album Amplified Tones at the local music store. No one was interested in this ‘weird’ music. I instantly fell in love with this obscure and lo-fi sounding album although I had never heard of Starfish Pool, I even didn’t now that he was from my own country, Belgium. I discovered a lot of other music by him thanks to my niece’s boyfriend, who was a DJ at the time. I didn’t have a turntable so he put EP 1, 2 and 3 on tape for me, just to name a few. I recorded all his music on a couple of tapes and I was listening to it constantly in my walkman.

This was a whole new and safe world to me: Starfish Pool’s music is quite unique. Very minimalistic, moody, dark and somehow out of this world. This fitted perfectly with my mood. During the years I collected nearly everything produced by this man, and also the stuff by other artists on his labels. What I concluded is that he is capable of producing a lot of ‘genres’. His discography is very versatile: techno, experimental, noise, ambient or electro but always with that minimalistic, hypnotic, and devasting approach. I played a lot of his cd’s to death so I just bought them all again. Insane? No: love.

Koen Lybaert still produces music nowadays under his Ontayso disguise, now more dub-orientated and with ambient influences (certainly on the same quality level of Rod Modell) . Totally different from his earlier work but still with high quality standards. The 24 hours box for example is a masterpiece of chilled, dubbed-out and fragile landscapes. Koen Lybaert will always be a great musical influence to me and I treasure his (now dirt cheap) EP’s and albums as much as my hard-to-find and expensive gems, that’s the least I can say.

A lot of my friends are obsessed with dark and minimal techno but when I tell them about Starfish Pool they say they never heard of him. That’s somehow a typical example of the Belgian attitude: they admire people like Hood, Mills, Ruskin, Surgeon etc (no offence, I like their music too) but they never pay attention to their own backyard. There are a lot of unknown gems to discover on the many early nineties labels from Belgium. Valium, Brain Pilot, Xingu Hill, to name a few artists from those labels like Nova Zembla and KK. Don’t look too far, the gems are just in front of you…

Aerial Service Area - Aerial Service Area - 29-Apr-09 05:30 PM
Truly a top class album on the legendary FAX-label. Aerial Service Area are Victor Sol and Nickolaus Heyduck, although 3 of the 5 tracks were co-produced by Atom Heart. The album is totally beatless, which in case of Victor Sol is pretty exceptional. All five tracks are very minimal, yet very engaging and haunting. ETI Encoding is nothing more than a modulating tone but it somehow manages to get your attention and sets the tone for an incredible epic to come.

Eternal keeps holding the tone of the first track, however it`s brighter than the first one but nevertheless extremely haunting and deep, it has the typical minimal approach of ambient from Atom Heart, an almost 19 minutes during trip that takes you towards the true destination of the album: an endless, deep chilling and spacey vacuum.

Liquid Water is the perfect bridge between the relaxing atmosphere from Eternal and the more intense part of Aerial Service Area: Highlow. This is the last shiny star of the chilling first part of the album, the perfect interlude.

The two highlights are yet to come: Highlow and Another Green Airport. Highlow is pretty holocaustic after a while with the bubbling acid line that comes in, it kind of reminds me of the Belgian Re-load sound from the mid-nineties, it`s very unlike to hear such a tune on FAX, yet it shows again how versatile the FAX-label is. The final chapter, Another Green Airport is a very minimalistic and tragic piece of ambient, the title is – IMO – based on Brian Eno`s output as it sounds like it could have been produced by Eno: think of Music For Airports very haunting and emotional and the perfect end for this incredible trip.

One of the less hard-to-find and rather cheap CD`s on FAX but an extremely good one.

Röyksopp - Melody A.M. - 29-Apr-09 04:43 PM
This must be one of the most overhyped albums. Melody AM got a lot of airplay back in 2001 and was considered as something new and fresh. Well, it isn`t. One half of the group, Svein Berge was part of the formation Drum Island back in 1997. Drum Island released one incredible album with the same name on the legendary Belgian label Apollo. If you`ve heard this album, and I`m sure most of the so called Röyksopp fans never heard of Drum Island, you can clearly hear that Melody AM is just a poor copy of it. I can`t count how many samples of Drum Island were used again in Melody AM as the album is full of it, a cheap way to the top? Don`t know, what I do know is that Röyksopp didn`t put much effort in creating something new. Even today all their new songs sound the same, over and over again and they get away with it.

Mr. Master / Blackway - A Dog In The Night / New Life / Follow Me - 22-Apr-09 06:10 AM
This is what you get if two of the finest Italo-freaks from Belgium work together: a legal, beautiful and perfectly remastered re-release of two of the best Italo-Disco records ever.

Mr. Master`s Dog In The Night was first released on the legendary label House Of Music in 1983, it`s almost impossible to find an affordable original copy of this amazing song, yes this is one of these more-than-100 EUR-records. Here we get the instrumental version, which is considered better than the vocal version by many Italo-lovers (I like both).

But the true gems are on the flip: New Life and Follow Me are pure Italo bliss, very futuristic and top-class tracks in every way. You can not compare this with any other Italo-Disco song yet it`s pure Italo-Disco: catchy and funky as hell, but in a total unique way. No wonder that this record (both tracks appear on the same record on Moon Records Association) is such a highly sought-after collectors item nowadays.

Before this record was re-released, it was just almost impossible to find it and very expensive (400 EUR or more), it was even difficult to find a copy for sale on e-bay. Well, here it is: a full, legal and fat sounding repress for an affordable price, finally these gems get the recognition they deserve, fresher and brighter than ever. Without any doubt the best on both Flexx and Radius Records. 5/5

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