For April Fools I wanted to talk about something that is as much ridiculous as it's enjoyable for me, so here it is - early youtube tutorial music the album. I wouldn't say this is a guilty pleasuse for me, as I don't believe this album to be bad at all, it's just so funny that I actually dig a lot of tracks there.

Alexander Perls' music is very nostagic for me, as I simply was there during those early days of youtube and much simpler days in the internet, where tracks like "Dreamscape" or "With a Spirit" were omnipresent as a placeholder default music to a lot of videos. That and also nu-metal stuff like Evanescence, Papa Roach and Drowning Pool... Apart from the sentimental value these tracks hold, I also really like trance music for some reason. And most of these tracks are just really well produced trance songs!

The most well known song here is of course "Dreamscape", often even hailed as "the national anthem of youtube". It's simply iconic and really ear-wormy, even tho it's not really hummable at all. It's often mistitled as "Trance" by troglodytes, who saw that one youtube upload titled something like "Trance - 009 Sound System, Dreamscape" and misintrepreted it. The song itself as well as pretty much all of the songs here are very hard to describe... They're all very similar and differ only by the tones and sounds used. Rhytmically and in terms of vibe they're all pretty much the same tho.

After "Dreamscape" the flow of this release completely breaks down. I don't even remember a second out of the next bunch of tracks. They're extremely repetetive, uninteresting and simply boring, but I understand that it's intentional. After all, this is not an album per se, rather it's just a collection of muzak-type tracks. "Standing Stones" it's a pretty nice track I guess. It has very satisfying chorus melody, but it could've been much shorter. Literally the same can be said about "Killer With a Thousand Faces", even though it's a shorter, 6-minute track. I like how it interesting and floaty/airy its chord progression feels.

With "Speak to Angels" it's the boring stuff all over again. This really hs no reason to be as long as it is...

Second half of the album holds another bunch of "classics", like "Trinity" and "With a Spirit", which are fine. There's also "Born to Be Wasted" - my unboubtedly favourite track on this release. It's just fun, has nice vocals and this extremely cool guitar part in the chorus that goes unbeliveably hard. It almost does not deserve to be featured on the collection of muzak trance songs.

All in all, it's a pretty mediocore album. I've made a fundamentally bad decision of approaching this "album" as a legitimate LP type of album. Not to mention that I unironically listened through over an hour of background music. But as I said in the beginning, this album is enjoyable for me, at least to some extent. It's just musically limited by design. Objectively, the production is great and the music itself is admitedly creative. The usage of weird, citar-sounding effects, the trancey, hard-hitting drums, heavy synths and simple guitar strums/melodies all together stand for more than sum of their parts, at least in my opinion. The juxtaposition of contemporary electronic music and christian themes is also an interesting and unexpected choice, that adds to this album's mystique and legacy, as it's very characteristic of it.

This is all just background music, but Alexander seems to have poured all his skills and creativity to create all of this! Nowadays, they would have just used some AI slop. This is probably the most soulful and human as muzak can get, and I think we gotta appreciate that this was made, even tho some of the tracks are not enjoyable.