And although I don’t like to do this a lot, I tie in Sjaak Overgaauw’s new CD under the name Premonition Factory into this story. Overgaauw, a Dutchman in Belgium has already made two albums (see Vital Weekly 725 and 771) of quite nice ambient music played on guitar and those loop devices which no guitarist can do without these days. Just Gwozdz with his piano, but then with a guitar. In the past Premonition Factory’s music reminded me of Vidna Obmana, during that late 80s, early 90s synth phase, and it still does. In fact the guitar hardly ever sounds like a guitar anyway.
On this CD the main course is a live recording in four parts made the excellent Dutch radio show X-Rated on Kink FM (who says commercial radio doesn’t play strange music?), plus two bonus live recordings from Cologne and Brussels. As said, its not always easy to recognize the guitar in here, but oddly enough perhaps in the opening part best. Layered, sustained tones from the e-bow and effects, kinda like Robert Fripp does. But in the second piece it very much sounds like a synthesizer in full cosmic effect, with an arpeggio bass synth underneath. Something similar, but more mellow we have in the Cologne piece. Perhaps less Budd/Eno, but still with a lot of atmospherics, I think Premonition Factory slowly evolves into something that is more of his own. Which is a great thing, as copying your heroes (say Eno, say Vidna Obmana) is nice, but doing something with those influences that is more of your own is of course always better. Premonition Factory by adding and melting his guitar playing with more cosmic music induced sound is getting there. (FdW)