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...Electronica, it turns out, was just another color, and artists have only recently begun to paint traditional canvases with it. Jonas Munk, as Manual, leads a second generation of masters.The sonorous rebirth of electronica written on Manual's first two albums (1999's Until Tomorrow is dated by needless glitches, unlike last year's majestic Ascend) is neither luck nor accident; it's artistry, creativity and poise at their apex, and we're talking about a guy barely into his twenties. His signature stereo-panned percussion, for its chiming chaos, can't distract from the spectral, oceanic guitar work central to Manual's sound: with Ascend, Jonas Munk dispatched about half the electronic music released in the last five-plus years, filling the chill-out void left in Seefeel's wake. The musings of so many of his peers feel conceptually thin and prefabricated in comparison to Manual's wandering, curious anthems.... -Pitchfork
Think of My Bloody Valentine, but lighter than air. Or think of what Air's soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides might have been like if they spent more time at the beach. Or think about Brian Eno, if he surfed and liked drinks with exotic names and umbrellas in them. Think about Tangerine Dream: their name even more than their sound. Think about the "shoegazers" gazing at a brillant blue ocean and jamming. Or think about that great wave of keyboards on the opening track of The Cure's Disintegration, but think of it not as an impending rainstorm but as a brilliant sun, a storm of sunbeams. Then think of all these things at once, and you've got a beautiful, awe-inducing force of nature......-Erasing Clouds Magazine
A painstaking labour of love that principally takes Durutti Column and the Cocteau Twins as its key templates and weaves their chiming matrix into a celebratory carnival of lush colour coded ambient structures of the type so rarely heard these days.all at once sensual, invigorating, heart stopping and quite simply perfect.........-Losing Today Magazine
...Sonically, its Seefeel meets Sons And Fascination era Simple Minds meets Kevin Shields meets David Sylvian; in other words it inhabits a world where boundaries blur and where sounds collide and move within and around each other to make something instantly, comfortingly recognisable yet with an abstract sense of the new.....-Tangents Magazine
Buy Manual albums at:
Darla (US)
Boomkat (Europe)
Play.com (world)
Other Music (US)
Amazon (US)
Download:
emusic
mp3.com
Audio Lunchbox
iTunes
Real Music Store
www.bleep.com
Other Stuff:
discography at Rate Your Music
Manual at Discogs
Manual at Wikipedia
All Music Guide entry
