Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 04/22/2008
The Music of Stars was a descriptively titled album of songs inspired by the background noise of the universe.
The Voyage (actually a previously unreleased work recorded in the 1970s but not issued until after the turn of the millennium) contains impressionistic echoes of sea travel. And so 2006's
Desert Dances completes the trilogy with an album inspired in part by the indigenous sounds of various North African musical styles. It helps to know that
Morris Pert is part of the same old-school U.K.
progressive rock scene that includes
Peter Gabriel (whose albums
Pert has played on in his day job as a session drummer), because
Desert Dances bears a strong influence from
Gabriel's similar explorations. By some distance
Pert's most immediately accessible album,
Desert Dances is basically a blend of
jazz,
progressive rock and
ambient music that's spiced with percussion and other accents from Moroccan or other North African forms, but wisely,
Pert stops well short of attempting to replicate this music himself. In fact, the best songs here like the languid, jazzy piano improvisation
"Tangier Nights," and the circling, mutating keyboard lines of
"Mama Quilla," sound more like
Another Green World-era
Brian Eno or trumpeter
Jon Hassell's experiments in ethno-fusion
jazz than the average vaguely colonialist "
worldbeat" album, and they're all the better for that.
~Stewart Mason, All Music Guide
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