PIANO-SYNTH MUSIC ON RIVER SERENE BY TIMOTHY WENZEL

[Lillie]

There is something about floating down a big, broad, slow-moving river on a summer day a la Huck Finn. What a way to fill a lazy day, letting your thoughts float along as you do the same on the water. It can be serenity unparalleled unless, of course, you round the bend and discover rapids up ahead. On his new album, River Serene, Timothy Wenzel used his keyboards and synthesizers to paint a serene scene of Monet pastels and sunlight flickering through the trees. Only occasionally do gentle rapids appear where he shakes up the meditation with nature a bit.

This is Wenzel’s third album and this musician seems to be on an upward path in the field of new age music. His last album, A Coalescence of Dreams, apparently got tons of airplay and went to #6 on the new age airplay chart called Zone Music Reporter. This new album, River Serene, is a hauntingly-lovely, generally-calm, reflective, meditative trip down a musical river. He utilizes not only a keyboard synth for all the whooshes, washes, zings and strings, as you would expect, but also nicely reproduces and mixes in a variety of other instrumentation from piano to violin.

This is instrumental pastoral new age music meant to relax you, ease that tension headache, and give you something very pleasant to listen to at the end of a long hard day when you sit back and put your feet up. Or put it on when you are driving the commute home to reduce road rage. Or play it at your next dinner party to keep the talk off of politics. This music, as its title implies, has a calming effect. According to the tune titles and some categorical sections, there is music here about rain, love, sunlight, dancing, trains in the night and dreaming -- all fruitful subject matter for musical interpretations.

Find a place online where you can listen to samples (such as CDbaby) and hear for yourself. It is always good to have some quality new age music CDs on your music shelf for those appropriate times when you simply really need it.