Release data:

Gert Emmens & Cadenced Haven – Life in Cosmic Highway
CD, Groove Unlimited, 2011

It was just a question of time before Gert Emmens & Cadenced Haven (aka Laila Quraishi) would join forces on a full-length album. Besides being partners and soul mates since a while, Gert already helped out on Cadenced Haven’s debut “Peregrination”.

And now there’s “Life in Cosmic Highway”, a 70-minute album in Emmens-style with occasional vocal bits. The featured music has as a warm, overall analogue feel with symphonic hints, combining melodic structures with nice sequenced parts and versatile (at times even) powerful rhythms.

But there’s also a vast amount of softness embedded in the nine tracks that makes it less interesting than I would have preferred. This profound “new age” edge to the outcome is distracting, making things a bit too mellow and cheesy to my taste (the smoothened 3-minute opening of “Call to Meghna” is a good example of that).
Despite several listens to the whole recording, I just can’t get accustomed to that. But I guess there’s still a lot to like here for fans of Gert Emmens.

One can hear 40-second bits of each track on YouTube, where Cadenced Haven has posted a videopreview on the album.

Website: www.gertemmens.nl

You can see what reviews I have done of these artists on the Cadenced Haven and Gert Emmens artist pages