His musical sights set on distant lands and faraway places, Werner Müller, who brought you such great previous “phase 4” stereo LP’s such as PERCUSSION IN THE SKY and HAWAIIAN SWING, has constructed a highly imaginative musical holiday for you in this, his latest and newest “phase 4” album. The orchestral globe-trotting takes us to Mexico, France, England, Brazil, Hawaii, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Japan, India and Turkey – and what a trip it is!
As you would expect, it is a journey filled with the tonal colours and harmonic hues that most appropriately and happily describe the visited place. Mr. Müller employs his orchestra the way a painter uses a brush: a touch here, a blend there; there a bold stroke, here a soft one – until each picture bears the unmistakable mark of the place. While you will easily pinpoint the directions from which the many sounds emanate, you will be sure to note with pleasure how richly wide-spread the strings are handled; they stretch across both speakers a lustrous curtain of sound. Always on the left is a chorus of women whose high-registered singing blends with the violins to give a brilliant edge to the sound. This combination of strings and voices (always prepared for you by a run or glissando on the piano) is delightfully used by Mr. Müller on each title to contrast and/or enhance the instrumentation that precedes it, an instrumentation which is usually geared to a description of the land or city being visited. Rarely has an album striven so pointedly to provide such multi-coloured effects: the splashes are brilliant, the textures scintillate with excitement, the blendings fuse to a level of sheer tonal excellence; rarely, too, has an album been so successfully completed.
