When Power Stars Collide - Property of the Pleiades Corporation

When Power Stars Collide bring us a new IDM release, 'Property of the Pleiades Corporation', featuring 6 songs plus 2 remixes. IDM doesn't turn up a lot in my current listening, but as always, I'm always eager to check out a group I haven't listened to before. The name of the group, the album, and the songs, along with the futuristic album art give me the impression before I even start listening that I'm going on a voyage through space.

The first track, "Lodestar (Polaris)" opens with soothing ambient textures before a spacey percussion groove kicks in. The percussion changes a little bit, layers moving in and out as the ambient drone lays beneath it. Over time, the drones change, too. The break at about 4:30 was unexpected, and the remainder of the song has a little more movement and melody. I love the feel of the first 4 minutes of this track. I've been in an awful mood today, very angry and tense, but as I closed my eyes and just listened, I felt transported away from that and was able to relax and breathe deeply for the first time today.

Next up is "Celeano (Lost Star)" which opens with some celestial sounding noise and twitters before a soothing keyboard riff enters. As with the first track, when the percussion comes in, it seems to sit on top of the melody. I like the percussion groove, but on this track it seems to cover up too much of what's going on beneath it, and I would have enjoyed this track more if the percussion had been taken down a little bit in the mix.

"Atlas (27 Tauri)" - moves the tempo up a little bit and brings in a good driving bass line to go along with the spacey synth lines. Again, the percussion sounds like it's on top of the mix, but it allows the bass line and the synth parts to come through well. "Merope (Lucid White)" has another good bass groove and synth lines. There's a synth part that sort of bleeps and bloops; it's rhythmic but it just feels a little heavy-handed when it comes in, and I couldn't quite get into this track because of it.

The fifth track, "Sirius (Queen of Heaven)" - opens with some discordant synth lines and with some sort of bleeps and bloops that give me the impression that I'm listening to equipment in a science lab from a 60's sci-fi movie. A noisy whirring comes starts and stops periodically. This is nowhere near as melodic as the rest of the tracks on the album, but it does a great job of evoking the atmosphere of a distant lonely space station or something. The last track before we get to the remixes is "Azimech (The Bright One)", and this returns to a pretty simple melody similar to what you hear throughout the first tracks of the album. It sounds almost like a music box; it's intriguing and very nice. I like it.

Next, we're given a couple of remixes of the opening track, "Lodestar". The Appa Balance Remix is a shorter, more sparse version of the original, and it doesn't do much for me. The delay on some of the percussion adds an almost polyrhythmic groove, that doesn't fit well with the drones and simple melody. The Love Through Cannibalism's Dreambreak Remix gives an almost theremin-like quality to the synth drones, and this remix fits in very well with the space theme of the album. I prefer the original track to either of the two remixes, but this has some really interesting spacey sounds and good bass drops that make the remix stand out.

I came away from listening to this release so much more relaxed than I was going into it, and I like it when music can really take me on a journey. For that alone, When Power Stars Collide deserve my appreciation. Combined with its thematically consistent music that imparts a sense of traveling through distant galaxies, "Property of the Pleiades Corporation" is a star shining brightly. May 30 2012