The Borderland was a large music review website administered by British music journalist John M Peters and featuring music that was generally produced by underground artists and small independent labels. The site closed in 2018, and I guess that all of the reviews were then lost as I can't find any on the ephemeral internet. The Borderland reviewed many of my early albums in the 2000-2010 decade, and when I asked about these in 2018, John sent me copies of his reviews, so for reasons of information preservation I've decided reproduce them here verbatim for posterity, one post at a time.
My note: This review applies to either the first version of Synaesthesia, R1A, released 01/08/1999 (which I think is most likely, this version was briefly sold by a small label called REV Records) or the second version, R57A (also coded historically as R1B) Synaesthesia, where some tracks were re-recorded in better quality, and some tracks re-recorded using NoiseStation 1 and released 19/06/2002.
Mark Sheeky - Synaesthesia
One of the pleasures of this job is discovering talented people beavering away doing their own thing and creating music far superior to that being pumped out commercially. Mark Sheeky is one such 'renaissance man': computer programmer, graphics artist and composer/musician, Mark has combined many of his talents to create Synaesthesia, one of the best commercial-sounding synth albums I've heard in quite a while. It's fair to say that this album wears its influences well: Jean Michel Jarre, Enya, Eno, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream - yet the end result is uniformly original and for any self-respecting electronica fan a bit of an ear-opener. The overall 'concept' for the album is life and death on a cosmic scale, so this album is pretty spacey sounding, lots of interesting and weird electronic chatter fill the celestial void.
Synaesthesia may be a tad short at thirty-five minutes, but it is packed full of catchy melodies, interspersed by short atmospheric pieces. Favourite tracks include The Runner, Interference, the very funky Refuge, the fuzz-ladens Termination, the Enya homage Waltz of the Ghosts, and Resurrection. The final tracks Islands of Memory and Epitaph are particularly atmospheric and remind me of Vangelis. This is a fine album and it certainly deserves a wider audience.
- John M Peters/The Borderland
