This is an unashamed salute to TQ.
You could hear it straight away on JEANNE D'ARC. There was a depth, complexity and texture that set that album apart. There was new life and a 3-way dynamic once again...and then Jerome left.....and what could have been sadly never was.
But Thorsten Quaeschning had arrived. 8 years on he's a veritable TD veteran now. And I rate both his contribution to TD and his solo/PPM material as highly as I do Johannes Schmoelling's.
Thorsten's sound design is flat out excellent, his keyboard dexterity nothing short of amazing and his compositions endlessly fascinating and unpredictable. Follow what seems like a simple lead line in SPRING WATER FALL and find yourself caught out for the 38th time. Marvel at the speed and uplifting brilliance of the solo in PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY Pt.6. Revel in the soaring, cyclical beauty of METAPHOR Pt. 3. Listen past the vocals to the gorgeous richness of SHAPE MY SIN. (Why oh why isn't there an instrumental release of this track!?)
And then he sits down at the piano, and despite how much I've always loved Paul and Johannes' playing, I am stunned. LILITH'S CRADLESONG is in turns delicate, mysterious and melancholic, before erupting into a display of such power and skill that by the time the final emphasised note echoes away you realise you haven't taken a breath for nearly a minute.
Back to the synthesisers he proceeds to produce what are, in my opinion, two of the best electronic tracks of the last 25 years...of all time in fact. DROWNING MOON and THE GRETHCHEN TRAGEDY from NATATORIUM are so good it's just ridiculous. I must have played them both a 100 times now and will likely play them a 100 times more and still not tire of them. And there's more intelligence, emotion and scope in a single minute of MOVE AND STILLNESS than there is in most entire albums of his contemporaries.
Just when I had begun to lose faith in the genre - round about the same time Bola dropped out of sight and Orbital gave up the ghost before a recent triumphant return - Thorsten Quaeschning has single-handedly rekindled it, as well as stamping his personality all over very smartly chosen and brilliantly produced re-workings of TD classics.
For those yet to delve into TQ/PPM's world, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a very tough ask of any band or musician to produce an album that is consistently brilliant throughout - to their supreme credit TD have managed it four times, in my opinion, with PHAEDRA, STRATOSFEAR, TANGRAM and EXIT. To date PPM have yet to conquer this particular mountain. Some of their more pop-py and four-by-four excursions leave me a bit cold, I have to admit. But there's no doubt in my mind that the peaks of TQ and PPM are amongst the highest around.
Only two other artists have brought me anywhere near as much pleasure this past decade as has Thorsten Quaeschning....and I'm increasingly finding I'm listening to him more than they.....
In praise of Thorsten Quaeschning
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32 years + counting
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