Heaven

REVIEWS:

Heavenly sounds with a lot of intellect […] Cosmic Baby alias Harald Bluechel has always walked a fine line between serious music and entertainment music. On the one hand he has remixed pieces from Sven Väth, Vangelis and Yello, yet on the other hand this classically trained concert pianist has embued his Trance tracks with a completely new dimension that deserves the title of “Techno-art”. “An album shouldn’t be just a collection of good pieces – it must also have a concept behind it,” says Cosmic Baby about his new album, “Heaven”. The 14 tracks are cleverly ordered in dramaturgical fashion, each taking you away to fantastical tonal worlds all of which could make up the sound-track of a dream. […]

Media Markt Vision 10/98

[…] and the sounds the concert pianist has created along classical lines genuinely soar. Light melodies over shallow rhythyms carry the listener away to another dimension. Whoever wants to can let themselves be swept away by the 15 tracks, woven together as a concept album, or just enjoy listening to them in the background. […]

Märkische Oderzeitung 17/10/98

Somehow it was time for the legendary trance musician, Cosmic Baby, to officially own up to his bourgeois background – there are after all very few people who identify their personality so much with their music that they stand out tall in the usual crowd of anonymous tracks. Cosmic Baby’s music was always a Cosmic Baby psychogramme, a process of emotional declaration from a no holds barred romantic dedicated to opening himself to people in the most direct and intimate fashion. Logically you are then exposed to attack and Cosmic certainly suffers most trying to appropriately assimilate the conflicting messages: from crowds moved to tears in 1993 to the current hefty criticism that started in later years. After the break with the past in “Loops of Infinity”, “Heaven” is the first release to at least partly directly recapture the sound-pictures of “Stellar Supreme! and “Thinking About Myself! and dedicate itself to the wide-ranging instrumentalisation of hyper-harmonic ostinatos. Sure, that is often nothing but undemanding main-stream kitsch, in Alan Parson’s “Lucifer” theme for example, but could we have expected anything else? […]

JD in Groove 08/98

[…] The techno Blade Runner was born in 66 and therefore actually too old for techno. The techno “Heaven” from Cosmic Baby 98 lies where it deserves, not even in bad breath range of Techno Mama Marusha, but in the listening trance of people who in the 80’s were influenced by heroes from the 70’s. “Heaven” is therefore either brilliant or completely off the pace. There is nothing inbetween. Cosmic Baby has given the album a philosophical superstructure. This is either comprehensive in New-Age style or arbitrarily arbitrary. The philosophical theme is basically uninteresting. Much more interesting, because it is new, is the attempt to couple wordless electronic music with the theory and content of a 70’s concept album. “Heaven” is no techno pop album like Sven Väth’s “Fusion”. It is an attempt to breathe new life into music that is by definition one-dimensional using a double album concept. The album, the concept, the artist, the ideology – electronic music that is inter-personal, ambitious, sophisticated, lovable, …but still a tad too close to Alan Parsons Project. Or has someone tried to be the first to steal “The Wall” for the next millenium? […]

Thomas Guntermann in GIG 09/98

[…] On the album “Heaven” he wanders skillfully yet again through musical fields that range from the soft to the burlesque. […]

Audio 10/98

[…] In 1998 Cosmic Baby still stands for that sound that made him famous: techno, trance, beautiful carpets of sound and virtuosity on the piano. “Heaven” is more than a CD, it’s a project with artists from different genres like film, graphics, and poetry. Definitely a sound voyage worth listening to. […]

(clubmoßphere) in Dates 11/98

[…] Cosmic Baby needed over three years to produce his new album. “Heaven” is a two piece concept album concerned with the worldly and the other-worldly. “They both exist in parallel” says Bluechel. For that reason both reach their musical zenith, their ideal culmination, exactly in the middle of the album, and also in the very middle of the final title, “Sketches in Spring”, when the dialectic between “worldly” and “other worldly” is briefly overcome. Cosmic Baby claims there is no term to cover his music, which is true, nevertheless you can hear influences. House, techno, ambient, trance, all combined with treasured piano melodies. Two beautiful tracks are “To Another Plane” and “Karma Il” because their driving beats supply the necessary swing for the dance floor. Lucifer does that too, but it has to be mentioned that it is an imaginative cover version of the “Monitor” melody from Alan Parsons. “Suite Russe” (Russian Suite) is a short and beautiful piano piece and “Good Times” reminds us of the good old (and new) days of breakdance. But the best thing about “Heaven” is its authenticity. […]

Robert Baumann in Orkus 10/98

[…] A 77-minute dream trip through a musical world of wonders. The term techno would be totally inappropriate here. Music, beautiful music. With a lot of snorkelling and distortion. Sometimes classically overdone, then suddenly set to pronounced drumbeats, a revision of seven years of Cosmic Baby on the one hand and the unmistakable influence of electronic pioneers like Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre on the other. […]

Dirk Waltmann in RaveLine 07/98

[…] Heaven on Earth. Whether his latest – and so far most ambitious – work “Heaven” is as outstanding as the press releases would have it – must be left to everyone’s own judgement, better to those who are prepared to listen carefully and at least a little intensively to the compositions which are often very surprising, particularly in the details. It will certainly capture attention, even if it is just because Cosmic’s name is on the cover. Cosmic Baby has remained true to the one tool with which he earlier created soundtracks, solo projects and remixes: “Heaven” is an album unmistakeably forged in a highly equipped electronic studio. […]

Stefan Krulle in Media World Magazine 09/98

[…] Whoever knows Cosmic Baby will understand that it is really not easy to describe this music. An attempt at explanation would probably be something like a symbiosis of electronic music and principles of classical composition ( not to be confused with techno and trance.) […] But one thing is for sure: it is not possible to choose a clearly favourite track from this CD – all of them are little masterpieces in themselves. […] Without doubt one of the top albums of the year.

P.A.M. für Junge Journalisten Bayern e.V. 13/09/1998