Roedelius/Story, Inlandish

Roedelius/Story is a side project of Cluster’s Hans-Joachim Roedelius, who’s been collaborating with Tim Story, an American synthesizer experimentalist and composer. Their third album, Inlandish, combines classical-sounding keyboard parts with a variety of processed instruments, creating a pastoral minimalist soundscape.

The album focuses on diferent droning piano or keyboard melodies, accompanied by a host of real and alien-sounding instruments. Everything on the album is of a piece — the sounds all complement one another. Unfortunately, too much of it is processed in the same way for it to sound very distinctive. Each track is pretty, and some of the melodies are strong, but over the course of an album, it starts sounding the same.

There are a few interesting moments here — on “Trouve,” one of the instruments continually shifts its quality, from something with a sitar-like sound to harmonium to vocals. The atmospheric sounds in the background in title piece “Inlandish” shift from biting to distorted to soothing. “Ripple and Fade” begins with a wash of ambient sound behind a skipping alien turntable.

Again, the album is pretty, and there are some interesting sounds on there, but overall, it seems slight. Considering that most of the overdubs and processing was done by Tim Story, it might have been different if Hans-Joachim Rodelius had more of a hand in the album. As it is, it’s ultimately not that interesting.