Gejius – Black Eyes

The first thing that strikes me about the Gejius album is how well it is put together. The packaging is a gorgeous Digipak, which is the new trend for good reason. Not only is there full color artwork but the inside cover includes the different technologies used to make the album. For any music/production nerd like myself this is a nice addition. On to the music…
I can’t quite put my finger on who Gejius reminds me of but the electronic bleeps and darkness of Aphex Twin and the drum samples of DJ Shadow come to mind. I like the way he mixes the electronic effects and live guitars to create a deep and live sounding album. Compositionally Gejius is all over the place, in a good way. There are some real strong areas of counterpoint and use of timbres like the synth string introduction of “ In Search of Moby Dick.” I can tell he studied music at some point and the inside of the CD thanks “Berklee & their professors who gave me what I needed,” which make sense. “Osmosis” is very strong in the same area and is an absolutely great demonstration of how good of a progressive musician he is.
Another aspect of the music I really like is the use of percussion. At times it is deep and gives the music a definite pulse and other times like on the song “the North Star” he uses it more as a background texture. The rest of the instruments seem to wander freely most of the time so it is nice to have the drum samples to fall back on. I can’t really tell whether he recorded them live or if they were bundled with Live but they sound so good.
Overall I think the album is very creative and well thought out but there are a few times where the tracks don’t flow too well from one to the other. I’m not sure if Gejius plays the same material live but I would really like to see how performs it. The album is split between the classical instrumental influence music and the straight forward dance music which is a great mixture but if they were separated into two different albums I think each would stand out on their own better. But what Gejius has here is an album pretty ahead of the times and one most musicians wish they could create.

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