Picture Palace Music – Symphony for Vampires

	3.5
Release data: Picture Palace Music – Symphony for Vampires CD, Manikin Records, 2008

Picture Palace Music is a project by Berlin/Vienna based keyboarder Thorsten Quaeschning, who joins Edgar Froese in Tangerine Dream very often.
His band’s goal is to reproduce the musical dynamic and experiments of old live accompaniment for silent movies and give them a modern soundtrack with nowadays-technical options.
The 15 tracks on this concept album, which is the second Picture Palace Music release, was inspired by the silent movie “Nosferatu” by F.W. Murnaus.

From the start it appeared to me the music fortunately doesn’t have that clinical sound that quite some of the recent TD albums suffered from.
The music of “Symphony for Vampires” contains quite some progrock influences, as the instrumental electronics get company of drums, bass and guitar on various tracks, which occasionally also feature some vocals.

“Demeter-morph” and “Scholomance trance” are great pulsating tracks on the album, the only minor point being the experimental, short outing “Celebrating Fears pt.4”

The well-executed tenth track “Vlad, Anton, Ruediger” could almost be a track by Edgar Froese, including some nice guitar work.
Towards the end, the melodic “Ligeias wake” is another strong effort with great groovy bass currents, followed by a straight rock piece.

The 8-minute ambient piece “Lilith’s Cradlesong” finds Thorsten playing some intimate piano, which later takes a dynamic turn. The closing vocal track is a nice pop song that keeps singing in your head after the cd has ended.

All in all, “Symphony for Vampires” is an enjoyable, well composed and produced album.

You can see what reviews I have done of this artist on the  Picture Palace Music artist page

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