"Syntharsis 2009" is a special re-edition of Odyssey's debut material, special insofar, as the listener does not only get the original remastered album, but also a bonus CD including previously unreleased session outtakes and a bundle of remixes.
The album is a fresh synthesis of "TD-getting-younger"-sequential electronics (TD in their "Melrose Years" up until now), solid lounge and slightly clubby elpop. This record is fairly groovy - let's pay attention to marvellous bass lines every now and then - and still the best single word to describe the feeling throughout the CD would be "flow": Odyssey's music is very "aerodynamic" and turns out to be a fantastically fluent electronic narration.
There are neither "typically dynamic" nor "typically ambient" tracks to find here, rather all episodes are multi-mood, multi-track and poly-meaningful. Odyssey's music is a "fresh-making" and a breeze-light one; one could easily imagine it as a film soundtrack - and indeed, it's worth mentioning how much in common some pieces here have with Peter Gabriel's "Birdy"-OST (1985): "Rephlexes" and, in the very first place, "Resynthesis".
"Time/Deep", one of the album "hits" remixed on disk #2, could have been a Jean Michel Jarre "Geometry of Love"- or "Printemps de Bourges"- piece on the one hand, while on the other hand we have here a nice piece of quasi Björk-ish mood in the chord-background (pick up some of Björk's "Homogenic" or "Post" single remixes and you'll see what I exactly mean).
As far as associations with JMJ are concerned, they are just welcome in case of "Sunlight" (romantic piano line and nostalgic chords going along nicely with modern programming and various scratchy and crunchy effects). Very interesting are also "Snapshots'" mechanical sequentials and a tasty spectrum of moods in "Terra Eois", where Odyssey is quite successful indeed in deconstructing the artificial frontiers between "traditional" electronica, new-age, club-sounds and lite-ambient. It must be mentioned that Odyssey's "art of sequencing" is on the whole very good and creative, it's not just another variation on TD-patterns, but rather a challenging, daring attitude, something like experiments by Pino & Wildjamin or Beatboys 2000, whereas the artists just mentioned successfully combined sequential and acid, but that's it, and meanwhile Odyssey's style and technique are one step further, so to speak.
Mature, developed, multi-layered arrangements are doubtless one of the finest Odyssey's qualities here - this also has to be put straight. Last but not least, I really do recommend disk-two-remixes, especially the Aphex Glitch Version of "Neurogenesis", perhaps not really in Aphex Twin or Glitch style, but it is certainly pretty fine stuff as if created by such remixers as Bitstream or Kid 606.
