Tracks and Traces reissue by Harmonia & Eno '76

An unexpected masterpiece, this Tracks and Traces reissue by Harmonia & Eno '76, a 2009 reissue of an album born from the collaboration of the German band Harmonia (which includes Michael Rother of Neu! and Cluster members  Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius) with Brian Eno with his huge contribution on synthesizer, bass guitar, vocals and lyrics and whose songs remained unreleased until 1997.

In the early 1970s, Eno referred to Harmonia as "the most important band in the world" and later joined them for both concerts and recording sessions after the band's breakup in 1976. In the 1990s, Roedelius retrieved the session tapes from Eno and reworked them for the 1997 release.

Electronic and acoustic music combined. 
- Welcome, a truly warm welcome to the opening of this album, we find ourselves suspended in the void, with a delicate guitar arpeggio, long keyboard sounds, the bass following with a soft base, the sweetness in a few chords. It's amazing how beautiful simplicity is, even when represented by artists who could work miracles with their own hands. 
- Atmosphere, is a synth loop with dark sounds and an almost muffled drum machine work, with ambient noises serving the rhythm. They wanted to give us the atmosphere, and they did it, that of a journey through a wormhole, slow as our time appears in the speed of light, wonderful images alternate. Truly beautiful! 
- Vamos Companeros begins with a distorted train, whose sound oscillates between dark and realistic, a train that accompanies the entire song, the bass creates a riff of a few chords repeated endlessly. The guitar is there, with its distorted, high-pitched, dissonant, studied sounds, introduced only after the initial loop has already hypnotized us. 
- By the Riverside, whose title recalls another masterpiece... only vaguely emulates its adagio, here there's a leaden atmosphere made of a few notes launched by echoing bass that move among distant high-pitched distorted sounds. Everything is a strange peace, which perhaps isn't. We don't know where we are, but we don't want to leave. Just over nine eternal minutes of pure, artisanal space psychedelia. A great song. 
And we're only on the first side of the first album. 
- Luneburg Heath, a song sung over a base of harmonious sounds accompanied by a creative loop of electronic bass. Great atmosphere, as that single phrase repeats throughout the song. The mini harp marks moments of dissonance. The deep bass makes the floor vibrate. We're still suspended in a dreamy mix for the entire duration of the song. 
- Sometimes in Autumn... with a new echoing loop of synths and space sounds that fly over the track. The loop grows in intensity after a few bars, the echo of meteorites hurtling out of the spaceship are a constant rhythm. We're traveling, with the swift calm of tiny spaceships in the immensity... distant thunder or distant cannon shots towards the close, which then continues for many minutes in a fade-out of intertwined sounds, light winds, skimming passages of spacecraft... a piece that is once again a sequence of images set to music. Stanley Kubrick would have Done Certainly a column sound .

I'll leave you to listen to the following tracks, which I recommend on a quiet evening where you can dedicate some time to yourself. 
With today's electronic instruments and information technology, not even with artificial intelligence, no one, absolutely no one, could do better, I'm sure of it, because this is art, not just electronics. Electronics is a tool at the service of human art, not the other way around. Experimentation? Absolutely not, but music, pure melody, taste, emotions broken down, fragmented, and splendidly reassembled "by four legends at their artistic peak who find new forms of expression..."
 

One of the most beautiful albums I've ever heard, a gem that appeared out of nowhere, with its stark gray cover hiding a precious content. 

The racks on this version 
1-A 
- Welcome 
- Atmosphere 
- Vamos Companeros 
- By the Riverside 
1-B 
- Luneburg Heath 
- Sometimes in Autumn 
2-A 
- Weird Dream 
- Almost 
2-B 
- Les Demoiselles 
- When Shade Was Born 
- Trace 
- Aubade

Lineup 
- Michael Rother – electric guitar, keyboards, drum machine 
- Dieter Moebius – synthesizer, mini-harp 
- Hans-Joachim Roedelius – keyboards 
- Brian Eno – synthesizer, electric bass, vocals, lyrics

Note: All links to the musicians' works are in the TAGS under the article title or on the "Artists" page.