Loading home…
Steven Cravis’s album Lavender Dreams is a digital masterpiece that delivers the profound satisfactions of a perfectly realized work of art. On previous albums Cravis has given us poignant melodies within a context of sensuous acoustic piano playing that at times verges on the sentimental. In Lavender Dreams the sensuality we have come to expect from the Amazing Piano Magician has a new depth and marks the arrival of a mature composer who has thoroughly mastered his medium. That medium is the emerging genre of computer-based electronic music that in the past has been diminished by the mechanical quality of the sound, a shortcoming entirely absent in Cravis. In his new album every instrument sounds as if it were played by hand, so that while the origin of every sound is his keyboard, the music is marked by a craftsmanship as consummate as it is spontaneous. Like Todd Rundgren, Cravis performs every note on his recordings and is equally at home on an animal skin drum as he is on a Mediterranean mandolin, albeit a digital one. Lavender Dreams is a landmark album. It is what fusion tried to be but wasn’t a journey into the musical unconscious. Fusion’s failure is partially attributable to a commercial mandate to overwhelm its audience with a pseudo-mountain of sound. Cravis unpretentiously takes up the tools of electronica’s loudest experiment and uses them to paint shimmering thought-dreams like a musical Miro. Steven Cravis has found his mature voice. This, his latest album, is a tour de force of technical virtuosity and musical inventiveness that pushes the envelope of what can be achieved on an electronic keyboard. It is a cornucopia of compelling voices and rhythmic invention that ebbs and flows in the imagination with the subtlety of a tidal basin. In addition to being a technical innovator, Steven Cravis is a serious composer. In Lavender Dreams he has fused New Age and Electronic music in a way that transcends both genres and points the way to the unlimited possibilities of digital music. Review by Mead Notkin (2004)