Stellarays - Winter Resort Music

A Closer Listen

Winter vacations are on their way, and this album may help travelers to get in the mood.  Winter Resort Music, inspired by “a childhood passion” for watching winter sports on TV, evokes both the Great Outdoors and the Great Indoors: the latter experience of living vicariously through the adventures of others who risk frostbite and leg break on the wide, white slopes.

On the surface, the genre is library music, but one might also imagine the album as a sports score.  If so, the setting is stretched beyond the ski slope and ice rink to the lodge itself, the lounge, the hotel room.  It all begins on the “Sun Deck,” as the athlete – perhaps arm in arm with a partner – surveys the scene: the vast mountains, the imposing clouds that blend with the slopes.  Already one is drawn back in time to an idyllic fantasyland, synth that once seemed futuristic now nostalgic in tone.  The bright surfaces of “Ski Documentary Theme,” melded to programmed percussion, are reminiscent of the Viewfinder era: wonders witnessed at the click of a wheel.

If the resort has an elevator, one might expect to hear “Cocktail Alpina” seeping from the speakers: flute and bells with wordless vocals and winking irony.  The atmosphere turns slightly weird as the reverie of “Night Talks at the Resort” gives way to mysterious meanderings and ends in a loop.  Are the athletes visiting each other’s rooms?  Are they supposed to be there?  Will what happens at the resort stay at the resort, or become tabloid manna?  The following piece folds in brief backward masking before the vinyl crackle of “Winter of Love” returns the guests to the chill-out room.

The set concludes with two of the most active pieces.  “Tropical Ice” is almost too fast to be called library music, encroaching on Giorgio Moroder territory until its sudden breakdown at 1:30.  “Thin Ice Skating,” the album’s longest track, suits up and heads to the rescue, audible wind whirling in the background, the spectator become hero.  The tone shifts from passive to active: the energy increases, the pulse begins to pound.  This is how it feels to be alive.  (Richard Allen)