Juno Reactor

Category: Trance
Album: Labyrinth

Juno Reactor has delivered a soundtrack album for a non-existent movie… Well, not quite.

Two of the tracks on Labyrinth, “Mona Lisa Overdrive” and “Navras” are from the soundtrack of the Matrix films. Many of the other tracks are in the vein of the high-paced orchestral-meets-electronica style that Juno Reactor brought to the “Burly Brawl” of The Matrix Reloaded.

The album starts with “Conquistador I,” which sounds as if it might have been a track written for Once Upon A Time In Mexico. It creates a soundtrack of acoustic guitar, lamenting female vocals, and an amazingly well-designed sense of cinematic beauty from the sound alone. This leads directly into “Conquistador II,” which transforms the first track into the same style of material as The Matrix Reloaded, filled with fast-paced electro sequencing, bass rumbles, and drum beats. These tracks are impressive in their ability to add a cohesive nature to the music, giving you a compelling refrain that would be most at home in a cinematic score, while at the same time giving very different styles and tones to the music.

It seems movie work has spoiled Juno Reactor and the whole album is written as if it is taken directly from a movie, which is not a complaint as much a compliment that Juno Reactor can create such solid atmospheres. The unfortunate part is that it is far too often the same fight scene action-packed music that one has already heard from Juno Reactor on the screen, repeated again in different forms, but always giving the same impression of its Matrix-ness, with the exception of “Conquistador I” and the cold melodic female vocals and slow world music rhythms of “Angels And Men.”

It’s impossible to say that the tracks aren’t well-crafted or that Juno Reactor lacks any significant ability to do what they do best, but one does get the sense that this is the one thing they do well and it’s all that you’re going to hear from them for some time. You have to enjoy and admire the combinations of world music and industrial-EBM beats and sequencing, the likes of which have been heard so many times in movies and on TV, but gets rarely noticed or released outside of commercial usage. So it’s good to finally have some of this put to disc. But it still seems that the days of experimentation are gone and all that is left to be heard is Neo fighting a thousand Agent Smiths in your head, which is at least more pleasing than the movies themselves.

 

from ReGen Magazine (~11/2004)