05/14/2022

A NoHo Arts music review of Dylan Tauber’s “He Loves Carmen” album.

Dylan Tauber is a very prolific musician. I just reviewed his album “Sounds from Space 2,” what seems like merely weeks ago, although it was actually last year…and I loved it. This new album is a bit more romantic, as you can tell from the title, but it’s just as enigmatic and emotional.

The idea that electronica can be soulful, human, or moving might seem antithetical to some, but Dylan Tauber’s music is profoundly organic. Each sound made comes from somewhere deep within his mind, he creates waves of rhythm and delicate spiraling emotive soundscapes. It’s easy to become transported by him, even as you listen to what is clearly manufactured. But isn’t everything we hear just our minds’ interpretation of what is real?

In that sense, each of us masters our own audio, our own unique version of echos of the world around us. So “He Loves Carmen” is simply Dylan Tauber’s reflection of his reimagined world. There’s also a collaboration with a Ukrainian vocalist on the album, recorded since the war started, which of course adds even more to the meaningful and poetic themes of love and peace.

Electronica music is the music of my youth. Eighties bands like Eurythmics, Depeche Mode, Thomas Dolby, Pet Shop Boys, OMD, Human League, all seem like the beginning of everything to me. So Dylan Tauber’s “He Loves Carmen,” with its purely electronic, synthesised, altered and manufactured sound, is deeply touching and familiar. It is warm and comforting in these uncertain times, infinitely and unabashedly human. I loved this album.