I first came across Jens-Uwe Beyer with one of his tracks on the excellent Pop Ambient series on Kompakt and The Emissary marks the artists first full length outing under his own name.

The Emissary opens with St.Pop which sounds like a spastic spaceship communicating with earth, and whilst it’s a little jarring at the beginning, it builds into something quite wonderful and beautiful, yet somehow disjointed…in a good way…and is completely at odds with the second tracks haunting solo treated piano-lead piece.

Track three (Tangering Moonshine) is a masterpiece in drones and pads that draw you into their textural quality so that you find yourself listneing to the tiny nuances in each tone and sound, until the beginnings of a beat begin and take over. I’m reminded a little here of the absolutely Brilliant Dust Kid III album in the way the reverbs build to create whole new sonic landscapes of their own. And so The Emissary continues in this vein for the remainder of the album.

This is the point of this kind of music I think – to create aural landscapes and atmospheres in which you can get lost, pick up on a theme and then lose it again when you find a new path to follow.

The Emisary takes you on a inner journey and allows you to interprate the music as you would wish. There is structure and there are rhythms of sorts you on your journey, but in the main the listener is free to explore their own inner-space. There is an other-worldy feel to The Emissary – OK, it’s well trippy – and i fealt that it had more in common with a majestic classical opus than its “pop” tag would suggest.

This is serious and intelligent electronic, ambient music of the highest order and is highly recommended. Out 11th September on Kompakt.
StJohn McCullagh & The Escorts – New Born