Potter Natalizia Zen - Shut Your Eyes on the Way Out (2018)

Nurse With Wound’s Colin Potter hooks up with Alessio Natalizia (aka Not Waving) and Guido Zen for this new album for Ecstatic; a sublime trip by three highly skilled synthesists that comes highly recommended if yr into Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, John Carpenter or Eduard Artemiev.

After stranding listeners in deep space with Schleißen 4 in 2015, Potter, Natalizia and Zen regroup along the percussive vectors of Shut Your Eyes On The Way Out - three years in the making and taking cues from Kosmische, abstract EBM and obscure library sounds for seductive new horizons of pulsing rhythms and floating ambient dub tones.

The trio control the mission with masterful skill and sleight of hand, prompting routes for the user rather than signposting the way with cliché. Of course, it’s hard to escape some sense of homage or reverence for the original forms, but they do so with such sensitivity to the material and “the journey” that the results simply transcends that heritage, to arrive somewhere, timelessly, out there.

They chart a steady course, slowly melting from cryogenic stasis to map out free floating space in Articulated, then holding their course despite the gravitational pull from massive objects in Rhythm Did Not Change, and under pressure of slow disco G-forces in the pulsing beauty of Linda, leading to the interception of panicked bleeps in Chaosmosis.

Over on the B-Side When Time Stops Moving the mission becomes very Tarkovsky-esque and surreal, with those lysergic drones really coming into their own, before the upside down tonal sculpting of Unsystematic Waves re-aligns the user’s brain functions in preparation for the stunning dynamic proprioception of Che Osmosi, where the route ahead becomes scrambled in a delirious tangle of nagging arpeggio melodies and pill-belly pulses, emulating pretty much how you’d feel, lost but happy to be zillions of light years from terra firma.