This six cd-box “80’s Box”, which comes with an extended booklet with lots of information and photo’s.
It contains five long out-of-print cassette albums by Dutch musician Ron Boots, all composed before his stunning debut cd “Dreamscape”.
For the box, Ron revisited his old albums, which were all carefully cleaned and valvenized to bring the music to nowadays standard but with preservation of the original feeling.
More in details, the set contains the albums “Dreamweaver”, “New Dream”, “Wind in the Trees”, “Moments”, and “Bookworks”.
In addition, the box holds a sixth album entitled “Odds & Ends”.
The rather melancholic sounding “Dreamweaver” was produced in late 1987, and was officially released as a C-60 cassette.
It offers over 70 minutes of overall dreamy and meandering atmospheric music, in which some minimal elements are also apparent.
The are sequencer tracks like “The Mystery” and “The Dream”, but one can almost feel and visualize the chillness and cold embedded in “The Machine”.
“New Dream” (1987) was originally released as a C-90 cassette.
The dreamy music continues, but slowly transfers into a rather atmospheric, sometimes slightly drony excursion, in which the addition of sequencers gives the music more body and depth.
The sequences for the pieces “Coldfields”, “Alpha” and “Andromeda” were created with the aid of a computer and a Yamaha FB01 sound-module.
“Wind in the Trees” (1988) was released as a C-90 cassette, of which the music made its debut at the Klemdag 1988.
For the music, Ron made use of a sampler, the Akai S700.The album is a highly cinematic piece of work which beautifully realms in the atmospheres of fall and winter.
The sound of “Snowhedges, Winter Coldness” still reminds of Klaus Schulze, but there are lots of fresh, new sounds to discover here, not to forget the strong compositional, rhythmic oriented pieces “Northwind Leaves Fall” or the fine “April Breeze”.
The 1988-album “Moments”(work title: “Inspirations”) came next, which was officially released as a C-60 cassette.
For the music, Ron introduced the Kawai K1, which became one of his trademark instruments.
It’s a nice collection of personal thoughts and feelings transferred into intense music, ranging some sentimental to romantic spheres.
As such, it reveals a part of Ron’s personal life, heart and soul in an honest manner.
Highlights on this album are the atmospheric “Cosmos” and “Clearmind”, the epic track “Once Never”, the pastoral soundings of “Final” and the imaginative track “Rivers”. The latter piece would later end up on the double mc-album “Hydrythmix” (by Project 2.1, aka Ron & Bas Broekhuis) and his debut-cd “Dreamscapes”.
“Bookworks” (1989) was Ron’s last solo-tape, which was put out officially as a C-60 cassette. For the music, Ron used the grand Roland D-50 synthesizer for the first time.
The album features a variety of highly cinematic music inspired by fantasy and science-fiction books, in which especially the writings of Tolkien and Stephen King played an important role.
Just listen to the beautiful opening of “The Stand”, or the Lord of the Rings related pieces “‘Khazad Dum” and “Paths Of Death”.
According to Ron, “Bookworks” was the hardest album to recreate for the box-release. A lot of the original synthesizers were sold, so he had to re-create the original feeling with new synthesizers.
As an extra, the box contains the album “Odds & Ends”, which contains the remaining tracks of the five cassette albums plus some rare tracks which were released on various compilations.
All in all, the box is a beautiful retrospective piece of work for any Boots-fan.
