(2020) Hollan Holmes - Milestones


Review:
One of the more surprising things about Milestones is that it’s Hollan Holmes‘s Spotted Peccary debut. After all, his sensibility and musical style so naturally align with the label’s, one might have thought he’d been with it for years. Consistent with that, the album’s ten tracks exemplify the kind of refinement, polish, and craft one would expect from an electronic musician with now seven full-lengths to his name, among them the 2010 debut A Distant Light and the 2017 double-CD opus Prayer to the Energy. As far as Holmes’s backstory goes, an early interest in synthesizers led to the acquisition of a Moog Prodigy, an analog classic he still uses. As a young man, he discovered Jean Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream, which set him on the path he’s been pursuing ever since. Based on the evidence at hand, Holmes isn’t out to rewrite the rule-book or create something wholly separate from what’s come before; instead, Milestones sees him proudly carrying on the musical tradition he inherited from forebears such as Jarre, TD, Klaus Schulze, and others. Any expectation that Milestones will be a full album of becalmed ambient meditations is dashed the moment “Transmitter” appears, a fabulously engaging slice of high-energy stargazing that’s as much indebted to funk as sequencer-drive space music; add a sleek techno pulse and the track could legitimately secure a spot on some future Fabric mix. As epic in scope is “One Giant Leap,” which merges voice samples lifted from 1969’s Apollo 11 mission (Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man, …”) and high-octane synth atmospherics to sweeping effect. Even a cursory listen to Milestones reveals the guiding hand of a composer, not just sound designer. Tracks are intricately structured, melodically developed, and methodically sequenced for maximum impact. Kinetic rhythms form grounding bases for chiming melodic patterns and engulfing washes to stretch across. Working with Propellerhead Reason 9 and 10 and Presonus Studio One IV to create the material, Holmes exploits timbral contrast to bring a multi-dimensionality to the presentation (the analog synth singing sweetly through “Bulletproof” might even be that aforementioned Moog Prodigy). While the pieces share common properties, each one registers as a stand-alone statement, and as the sixty-four-minute collection advances, Holmes pushes the material into trippy psychedelia (“West Texas Backroads”), epic choral (“Inner Sanctum”), and ominous dark ambient zones (“Something Wicked This Way Comes”). Like all Spotted Peccary artists, Holmes’s release benefits from the label’s polished presentation and the customary high-quality mastering of Howard Givens. There’s certainly enough scenic astral traveling here to keep space music fanatics satisfied until Holmes’s next Spotted Peccary volume materializes.





Tracklist:



Media Report:
Genre: ambient, electronic
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits