Alone or with Tuxedomoon's Steven Brown, Belgian electronic artist Benjamin Lew created inspired, hypnotic and instantly recognizable musical landscapes over the course of four albums, from which this collection has been compiled. An invitation to dream and to travel.

Benjamin Lew by Anaïs Prosaic

This selection of tracks taken from the albums "Douzième Journée" (1982), "A Propos d'un Paysage" (1985), "Nebka" (1988) and "Le Parfum du Raki" (1993) outlines the quintessence of Benjamin Lew's world, without ever totally unveiling the mystery hiding behind these very literary (almost Duras-like) titles. These albums had originally come out on Made To Measure, a series devoted to the more playful and inventive varieties of musical experimentations then taking place in Europe and the US.

At the crossroads between visual arts and poetry, between dark European romanticism and bouncing minimal music, electronic treatments in the spirit of Jon Hassell's Fourth World music, or ambient à la Brian Eno, sounds which seemed to have escaped from jazz or from the East... superlatives were gushing from the pens of reviewers to describe the seduction exerted by these instrumental pieces with as-yet-unheard atmospheres, hypnotical and melancolic soundscapes full of semi-organic, semi-robotic silky palpitations... Several satellites of the Crammed planet also in Benjamin Lew's orbit: Steven Brown, Peter Principle and Blaine Reininger (who brought some of the misty soul of Tuxedomoon, the San Francisco art-rock band living in Brussels at the time), Vini Reilly (the phantom guitarist also known as Durutti Column), and sonic alchemists Marc Hollander and Gilles Martin.

Originally a press and radio journalist, A.P. is a director of music documentaries for television (Arte, Canal+, Mezzo).