A EUROMANTIC RIDE

ROLF OSWALD
Event Horizon

In this CD by Canadian electronic composer Rolf Oswald, peppy techno grooves mingle with dreamy New Age washes and listener-friendly melodies. The result is a pulsing, "Euromantic," if sometimes cliched, 43-odd-minute ride.

Oswald wrings lots of colour from his ensemble of mostly synthetic (as opposed to sampled) instrumental sounds. His well-crafted arrangements keep the show rolling with nary a dull moment. The ten selections, performed and "sequenced" (the musical equivalent of word processing) by Oswald, are as clean as a digitally sampled whistle. True, you may occasionally feel as if you're listening to canned exercise music ("Excelerator") or to some generic game show theme ("Terminal Velocity"), but even these lapses are too smartly done to spoil the ride.

For me, the last stop is the best stop. In the pensive "Rain Shadows," a reverberant Spanish guitar, hauntingly accompanied by unearthly whining, whistling, droning synths, steps out from behind the mist and the clouds to declaim a melody of touching beauty.