pentatonik - "credo / zeitgeist"

i don't know if it was a sudden nostalgic impulse or a keen desire to hear something upbeat that wasn't a post-sept 11 auto commercial, but i recently threw this in the cd player and ended up playing it on loop for the afternoon. pentatonik was one of the most promising artists in the early nineties uk ambient techno scene; this seems unfairly specific, crudely reductionist even, since r simeon bowring and his many collaborators were blessed with the often dubious talent to speak to nearly every listener of any persuasion. the music's unabashed accessibility makes pentatonik's relatively unknown status even more puzzling. zeitgeist, a stunning spaghetti western soundtrack made from feedback and loops, would make the phone ring nonstop whenever i pulled it out for my college radio sets in the way back when. so the question lingers: why wasn't this band utterly massive? it ain't for us to know, i suppose. credo / zeitgeist was the last proper pentatonik release and after a star turn on north south records' this film's crap, let's sample the soundtrack (the secret's out; i stole the name for my dj sets), the band was done. bowring resurfaced a few years later among brixton's anorak crowd, and he's been making bent electro and old school hip hop as the a1 people on hydrogen dukebox ever since. fans of global communication project the jedi knights, apollo 440 or even AFX should give his new stuff a listen.

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