Between Interval (a.k.a. Stefan Jonsson) is a recognized electronic trance/chill artist from Sweden. With "Secret Observatory," he is making his debut as a U.S. recording artist. Seeking a view of distant worlds, Between Interval wields a powerful telescope built by sound, peering deep into the sky, revealing with real purpose the co-existence of the past, present and future. This album has crossover appeal to electronic, chill and ambient space genres."Atmospheric" hardly seems adequate to describe the fascinating aural architecture revealed on Secret Observatory, the first recording on a U.S. label from Stefan Jönsson, the Swedish producer whose cryptic public ID is Between Interval. It's an unhurried, deeply reverberating, edge-of-the-universe opus that resides well beyond the gravitational pull of what we know as music or traditional composition. An absorbing work of slowly evolving sound design, it resembles what Tangerine Dream might have given us in their Phaedra era had 21st-century studio technology been within their reach. Jönsson's palette is wholly, splendidly electronic (not a note of percussion to be heard), and he sustains a nonjarring, deep-megahertz ambiance throughout the disc's 56 minutes as he transports listeners to the far fringes of deepest space. The result is an audio sojourn that is mysterious and wondrous, with a faint hint of tension that gradually translates into a state of cautious awe. Space winds, subsonic rumblings, distant pulsars, brief celestial voicings, eternal darkness pierced by gleaming shards of illumination--Jönsson treats all of these familiar space-music cues to sophisticated interpretations and judiciously weaves them into a floating, Voyager-like audio excursion for the mind. Not as caressing as most Jonn Serrie recordings; not as foreboding as some works by Steve Roach or Michael Stearns. Think of it as an audio documentary of how humans imagine deep space might actually sound. Worth a listen if you're a serious space-music fan. --Terry Wood
