The Vitals:

Label: Cardamar Music
Genre: Ambient/Chill-out
Number of Tracks: 9
How to Obtain: www.cardamar.com, iTunes

Factor Scores:

Production Quality: 7.5
Programming and Arrangement: 7.0
Entertainment Quality: 6.5
Total: 7.0 - Good

Z's take:

One of the main reasons I love ambient and chill-out music is because of the seemingly consistent relation to movie soundtracks. There is something about the sounds and compositions in this genre of electronica that make me think of movies and storylines and drama.

In that way, Reconstructed Moments is just what I listen for when building my collection. Marco Torrance—who also produces under the wider known moniker, Zilent Zpott—is a talented song crafter. This recording has electric guitars, piano parts, and vocals by Michelle Richer. Torrance's ability to create fresh sounds and compositions sets his music apart from much of the crowd.

The disk begins with "Stranded Feelings", a pad/synth-driven ambient, yet guitar-laced track. It has a strange, almost haunting similarity to the theme from "Top Gun", but it gets immediately stuck in your head to leave you humming along even after you push the stop button. The guitar part in this track is played by Volker Kaufmann (of the German duo, Shaped Signs). It breaks through the ambient tones to bring in one of the most amazing melodies I have heard in electronic music. "Stranded Feelings" is by far my favorite track on the CD, and I found myself replaying it a few times before moving onto the rest of the disk.

The music then moves calmly forward through each of the 9 tracks. It gels nicely through the entire CD, producing some emotional atmospherics and soaring instrumentation, but it does not seem to fully resolve and ultimately settles back down into low-bpm ambient. I didn't mind the fact that each track seemed to be a variation on a recurring theme. I do the same thing with my music. But in the end, I felt it was too much of a good thing, and I was missing the plot somewhere in the mix. The tracks were almost too similar to each other.

If you listen to a lot of ambient or want something that you can read or pray to, this would be a disc you might want in your collection. It is definitely a nice addition to the genre, but I rated the entertainment quality lower because, after a few listens, it does feel lacking in intensity.