Jeff McIlwain returns on U-Cover as Lusine icl with this fitting follow-up to last year’s brilliant release A Pseudo Steady State. The superb and groundbreaking innovation of A Pseudo Steady State caught many off guard, exhibiting a fantastic display of professional-sounding electronic compositions carefully presented as a seamless album of futuristic and timeless musical works.
This time around, we are treated to a collection of live arrangements further exemplifying McIlwain’s abilities to create inventive and ultramodern works of aural art within a live setting. The music on Coalition 2000 builds precisely, at times developing 10-minute songs out of a single initial sound or pattern. The entire album flows as if it were a single track, utilizing lengthy phases of atmospheric soundscapes to merge the more familiar tracks like “Sem3,” “Lazydayz,” and “Feedme,” and giving them subtle variances to reflect their live setting.
While listening to Coalition 2000, the listener is given the feel of witnessing these songs unfold in real time, as if the composer were building them solely for the listener alone as a reward for focused interest in his work. Each piece of music is carefully exposed, paralleling the original tracks at times, but ultimately emerging from a slightly different dimension. Miniature pieces of sound in an otherwise moment of silence will foreshadow a song’s peak, at times several minutes beforehand, effectively adding to the true fluidity of the album’s flow.
Coalition 2000 is a refreshing, inventive, clean-sounding electronic record that will have even the most adamant purist lending an ear to this outstanding release. Jeff McIlwain continues to expand on his already insightful music writing talents, again composing another stimulating collection of songs that are years ahead of many current offerings in this genre.
Coalition 2000 is available on U_Cover.
