Description
With great pleasure, the sound of the Fender Telecaster makes its way into the ears of the listener. Stardelayer Carsten Mentzel, moving through time and space with weightless grace, leaves an endless shining trail on his way to the stars, a trail filtered from an extract of the very finest elements of sound.
“A New High Fidelity Tripout’, the new album by producer, sound wizard, multi-instrumentalist and composer Carsten Mentzel, already widely known through diverse Ozella music releases, is proving to be the perfect musical manual on the art of deceleration in these hectic times.
Mentzel alias Stardelay practices the art of freefall here, minus the crash landing. Unerringly, he steers his starship through intergalactic fog zones composed of a delicate weave of trip-hop, ambient-lounge, slow funk, electro-pop fusion and nu-jazz. Bittersweet emotionality and an almost sensual melancholy spread rapturous guitar and sitar sounds, gentle keyboard waves and the whisperings of archaic bass. His singing also graces this album on three tracks.
“My excursions into the most diversified styles – from acoustic folk all the way to rock ‘n roll – resulted in me acquiring a huge voice range”, explains Carsten Mentzel, who now has more than 3 ½ octaves at his disposal. With an exhilarating falsetto, he outstrips more than one female vocal star, but is still far from giving his voice a seemingly pure feminine touch. The gentle roughness of his voice in “Thoughts & Words” reminds us of Sting, while he lets Sade’s smoky voice seduce us on his version of Portishead’s “It Could Be Sweet”. And downright seductive is exactly what this “Starcollector” is on the track “Something Else”, which sounds like the theme song for a Marilyn Monroe film that was never made.
The oneness of vocal brilliance and instrumental artistry on this album flows into an irresistible sound experience with the highest possible chill-out factor. Hypnotic harmonies, compellingly beautiful melodies and subtle down-tempo rhythms, which could do honor to all the pop classics from Portishead to Pink Floyd, give ‘A New High Fidelity Tripout” a touch of cult.
