New Music of the Day- XL : Resonate – Avec Sans (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

If there is a silver lining to the post-punk, electro pop experimentations of the early eighties, it is that a generation later a whole new breed of musicians are accessing those embryonic movements, plundering, refining and improving on the genre. A combination of technological advancement and the acceptability of cross genre, musical gene spicing that would have been hard to imagine in those often dark days of guitar = good, keyboard = bad, has resulted in many boundaries being trampled asunder.

I can’t think of many better than Avec Sans to represent the sharp end of that evolutionary journey. To a generation who see electronica and synthetic recreation as just another musical tool, which of course was all it ever was, they seem to occupy a place where mainstream pop dovetails into future dreams, the perfect marriage of man and machine, where technology casts off the cold, clinical image of the past in favour of warm, rich textures and a euphoric embrace. But if the past is a foreign place where things are done differently, somehow Resonate feels like coming home.