Glitched Orchestrals Is Back And Is Dancing With The Moon

Glitched Orchestrals is back with another fine concept album. The follow up to their 2014 “Dances with Whales” album, “Dances with the Moon” takes the listener on another conceptual journey.  This time, the album is inspired by (and just in time for) the total solar eclipse of the moon on March 20, 2015. With song titles like; ‘Blue Moon’, ‘Moon Rise’, ‘Harvest Moon’ and ‘Eclipse’ Emil Schyren and his group of highly skilled and talented cohorts paints an aural picture that evokes Earth’s little neighbor, long a source of inspiration for artists everywhere.

Glitched Orchestrals is a twenty-two piece orchestra whose style is a hybrid of neo-classical electronic instrumental orchestral music fused with rock riffs and urban beats. The group is fronted and conducted by Emil Schyren, a classically trained pianist from London. In addition to Schyren on piano, the nucleus of the band is Stefan Magnus on guitar, Binky Bentley on drums and Susu Kawasaki on bass. Accompanying these four is an eighteen piece orchestra encompassing strings, brass, and woodwind instruments. There are many terms in the popular lexicon that might be used to describe this group like, ambient or experimental but the listener would be sorely mistaken to dismiss this group based on that narrow view. Brian Eno said "Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." In this day and age of instant downloads and albums with hopefully one good track, it is heartening to see artists with a broad sense of their work and a cohesion to a particular long- form approach. Glitched Orchestrals takes the torch from such artists like Mike Oldfield, Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis and represents the genre quite well in the new millennium.

From the uptempo and very modern beats of songs like ‘Midwinter Moon’ and ‘Moon Flower’ to the more dark and brooding compositions like ‘Moonglum’ and ‘Moonbeams’, Glitched Orchestrals has created a work of approximately 50 minutes that holds together as if bound by superglue. Sure, the tracks work individually but put all together, it is a musical landscape that listeners can devour. I look forward to hearing more from this group and anticipating what comes next.

Glitched Orchestrals Website

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