Sean Trane
Well if you’re not impressed with the general lack of energy level of the PMG in studio and the systematic use of those horrible synclaviers, your hope was to go for a live album and Travels might have looked like a solution…. Yes I said “looked” and not “sounded”, and indeed the live concert stuff sounds just like the studio stuff, which means energy-less and to be quite honest, just as boring and bore the exact same line-up. OK, ECM jazz was rarely my thing, but by the 80’s, it was sounding a lot like elevator or supermarket music, and often the PMG was rather close to it, but maybe a tad more boring than that dreaded category. Released just after Offramp, it only contains the opening track Are You Going With Me, and to be honest, it’s right up the studio alley it was recorded in….. Boredom Impasse (that’s not a track name, but the should-be title). The rest is really not much better, suffering from the use and abuse of those hate-worthy synclaviers plaguing that dreadful early 80’s era. Indeed, can one get more sleep-inducing than the new-agey The Fields, The Sky
Only a few tracks do pull their aces timely in the game, and San Lorenzo is one of them, and the title track also seems to shake the general torpor of the set it had sunk itself into. What’s always inducing in error in these kind of live endeavours is the recorded public applause and reactions, clearly in this case recorded in the crowd itself, rather than the soundboard, so it appears overzealously appreciative, probably inducing more excitement to the auditors than the music itself.