With The Hermit\u2019s new album, everything is about the number 4: the four elements – fire, water, earth, air \u2013 each represented through four tracks on an album that closes with \u201cAbyss\u201d, a mystical final track and psychedelic ambient journey into nowhere. The 16 tracks leading up to this finale expose The Hermit\u2019s trademark sound consisting of dark post-industrial EBM references, early rave memories and contemplative synth improvisations, a hybrid which reminds not least of the legendary Analogue Bubblebath-series. But something is different this time: without any doubt, \u201eLiber 4\u201c comes across as the most mature piece of work in The Hermit\u2019s oeuvre so far. While his earlier works often had a sketchy appeal to them, apparently struggling to focus on one of the many ideas The Hermit brought to the table, his new tracks demonstrate a much more confident drive towards a singular goal for each of the highly diverse tracks, which finally are spelled out in all consequence until the very end. A track like \u201cHermaphrodit\u201d would have suited the likes of Robert G\u00f6rl and Gabi Delgado, \u201cThere Is\u201d sounds like the early AFX sharing a cigarette with Front 242 in a chillout room somewhere during the 90s, while the sci-fi ambient funk of \u201cEquation\u201d reminds of the likes of Kenny Larkin. The Hermit\u2019s works always used to be very diverse and mind-blowingly full of ideas. What\u2019s new here: each and every idea gets the space it deserves and is spelled out to perfection.
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\n„The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimely reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.\u201d (Part of Einsteins Credo 1932)<\/p>\n
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