GANDALF
Between Earth and Sky
(c) (p) 2003 Real World  Music
12tks/66mins

These sounds conjure up
Long wanderings and battles past
In memory of mine...

      Bygone myths come alive in this music. With its sounds ancient lands are springing up which were kept from us covered with a veil of times. Strange towns come alive and magnificent vessels are going under sail driven by courageous warriors to unknown lands. Over again wild unbacked steeds are grazing on many-coloured meadows, fabulous creatures are hiding in the shadow of boundless woods, and an unknown danger is lurking behind the peaks of distant mountains... This music opens the door to a mythical land which turns out to look like to the Inland from a famous trilogy " Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R.Tolkien.
      It is not by chance that an Austrian musician Heinz Strobl took a pen-name Gandalf after a powerful magician bearing the same name. His tunes are full of romantic appeal and poetry. You are absorbed in a fairy world of the trilogy " Lord of the Rings" and sense a flavour of the unknown to you up to then, mysterious and at the same time beautiful, beyond expression, life. The album " Between the Earth and Sky" is the new age music of the highest order! With a tender vocal in " The Blessing" composition, a mediaeval guitar and flute in " Stardust Dreams" , and aloof and sorrowful keyboards in " Dreamcatcher" . This music is imbued with nostalgia for the past and at the same time it is an utterly up-to-date music. It takes ethnic tunes in and makes an alloy of them in a single cauldron of global universal music. And in spite of all this it does not lose its individuality. Quite the contrary you reveal always new facets of Gandalf's creativity and become inspired with an enchanting flavour of his divine music. You feel that for a certain time you just start living in this music and exist in a fairy-tale reality which is created by Gandalf.
      The musician uses a great many of various instruments. Here is an acoustic 12-string, classical and electric guitars, a sax and a piano, keyboards and a mellotron, as well as a balaphon and a percussion. In creating the album Gandalf was rendered assistance from White Horse (a cello and vocals), as well as from Peter Aschenbrenner (flutes, a soprano saxophone and a backup vocal). Moreover Peter Aschenbrenner has been working together with Gandalf practically from the very start of his musical career.
      Where does this fairy voyage lead to? Maybe, to the woods where beautiful Galadriel, the mistress of the fairy forest, is looking forward to you? Or to distant lands where a white town is towering and at the walls of which the last battle with the omnivorous evil will take place. And for some reason you start believing that all the hardship will be overcome, and the evil will be exterminated once and for all, and the new beautiful world will appear on this long-suffering land…
      Gandalf's music is a going back to roots, a glance to the future where no place for cruelty and animosity.

Having set out for a long voyage,
I'll take with me my tunes alone
And go to the land of which
I have a very hazy recollection,
The land of sweetest dreams
Which waits impatiently for me behinds the sky-line,
The fairyland of bliss and love,
Which for a while is covered with the fog,
My heart that knows all
Impels me strongly towards you.

Serge Kozlovsky
email: serge_kozlovsky@tut.by
web site: http://sergekozlovsky.com

P.S. Translated by Tatyana L. Permyakova.