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Where You Go I Go Too
Though his first full-length collaboration with Prins Thomas was a notable exception, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm spent most of his early career working in the traditional dance music format constraints of the 12” — most of which, as collected on the 2006 compilation It’s a Feedelity Affair, showed off his ear for tersely efficient and miles-deep nu-disco grooves that didn’t need to go much longer than six or seven minutes to feel epic. That made Where You Go I Go Too the kind of “debut” album that also served as an ultra-ambitious expansion of its creator’s sound: it’s a three-track, 55-minute opus with a nearly half-hour-long title cut and two other 10-minute-plus excursions that could hardly sound more different from each other. The slow-unfolding sprawl of the titular leadoff plants its flag early — the ambient drift of Tangerine Dream, the staccato guitar-pierced motorik of Manuel Göttsching, the hypnomelodic electropop of Jean-Michel Jarre, the beautiful-horror synth-disco tension of Cerrone in “Supernature” mode — and watches it flap in an increasingly brisk and shifting wind current, pacing it so there’s always some striking new touch to continuously elevate the mood throughout its formidable length. (The sweeping synth chords that first emerge around the 7:20 mark serve as the basis for one of his most breathtaking recurring motifs in the final third.) It’s such an audacious and effective distillation of his influences into a distinct vision that the other two songs risk being overlooked, but they’re compelling contrasts, too. “Grand Ideas” is Lindstrøm steeping his impulses in the seething pulse of early ’80s Italo and finding it equally foreboding and joyous; it’s like an ideal midpoint between Kano’s “It’s A War” and Led Zeppelin’s “Carouselambra.” And “The Long Way Home” sets up a frenetic, arpeggiated sense of journeying restlessness that transforms unexpectedly yet sleekly into a smooth-soul fugue that sinks impossibly deep into its own overupholstered relaxation.