The boundary-breaking, genre-crossing electronica project Juno Reactor has excelled itself with their eighth album. The Golden Sun of The Great East is a stellar release that is at the apex of both Juno’s output and electronica as a whole, featuring a diverse blend of both real-world and otherworldly sounds. As with the best of their albums, each track is a full story and its placement in relation to the whole contributes to an even greater narrative. With seamless production and uncompromising musicality, this release sets a new milestone of what is musically possible and opens up new potential trajectories in the creation of electronic music.

The title of the album refers to spiritual teachings of Shambhala. Juno founder Ben Watkins had originally considered calling the album From Here To Oblivion: “I had those words in my head, ‘from here to oblivion’, all the way through the album, and by the end or near to the end, I kept on thinking the album is really positive, not sort of as depressing as the title… I thought I had to change it, so I came across this idea of The Golden Sun of the Great East.” The title refers to Buddhist teachings that are like hidden treasures, “delivered in times when they are needed the most…visions of a fearless society, and compassion, and trying to bring the human mind back to its original state… and I just thought that was amazing, like seeing into some dimensional parallel world. So that was really the inspiration, as I realized when I looked back at a lot of the bits of the album…it was almost like it was just delivered to me, and the way it landed, it felt like it was a hidden treasure.”

With this album, Juno here incorporates traditional Indian music, with sitars and both male and female folk singers, while also including operatic vocalists, conventional band sounds, and electronic influences, seamlessly bridging outwardly opposing cultural musical languages. “Because we came out of the early days of the Goa scene, I’ve always very much sort of not wanted to sound anything really related to India. I made one track when I worked with Deepak Ram, and that was very natural so that was very good… I thought that now’s a good time to go and try.

“So it was just purely by luck in some ways that Jehan, who runs the Blue Frog in Mumbai, invited me and the band to do three days in India, and I took advantage of that and stayed in Mumbai for three or four weeks and really soaked up the city in my head and I started writing a lot of music in the hotel, and then I booked time in the Blue Frog Studios and I recorded there. I met Hamsika [one of the vocalists] there, I met the guy playing the sitar, the percussionist, and then I recorded the singer in Invisible in a taxi… I was in the car going from one film studio to another to meet different producers, and in popped this singer into the car, and I think he’s a famous Punjabi folk singer, so I go, ‘Come on, sing us a song, I’d love to hear your voice’ and he sang for me this amazing song, and he kept on going up and up and up, and I thought, ‘Well, he’s gonna stop soon,’ but he didn’t, he kept on going. And I got back to England and it was a semi-tone off from the track I’d been writing in Mumbai, so I just pulled him down a semi-tone and cut out as many of the car beeps as I could. I was very lucky in the lack of car beeps…”

The nine tracks presented were chosen from an array of potential works that Watkins has produced over the last while. “I can’t believe how long it took me. I don’t know whether it’s just naturally harder to find stuff that makes me excited or makes me want to finish it. I must have done thirty tracks, you know, some of which are hanging in suspension, wondering if they’ll ever be finished, or totally rejected, or whether they should really be on another project. So it took quite a long time trying to get that flow of an album that really made sense to me.”

Throughout the album, the listener is treated to a varied combination of transparently layered synth sounds that bridge the earliest years of electronic music with its current phase of evolution – including a melodic line in the opening number reminiscent of Vangelis that fuses beautifully with the driven rhythm and rather sinister modulations in the bassline. While Watkins has always aimed to move forward (replying to one Facebook comment itching for their earlier sound “Who wants to write the same album for twenty years?”), he doesn’t ignore his past with this release, embracing key elements of their distinctive multi-faceted sound while adding others. Indeed, in addition to the newer collaborators on this project, Watkins enlisted some familiar names from the psychedelic trance scene, among them Johann Bley, Kris Kylven, Xavier Morel, and Nick Smith.

The album starts off with the full-throttle ‘Final Frontier’ – a telling title (much like ‘Beyond The Infinite’) that highlights how Juno starts beyond where most producers end and keeps on pushing the limits. A wonderful blend of chimes, a driving bassline, Indian vocals, international guitar riffs, and sci-fi inspired effects, this track launches the journey with full velocity. ‘Invisible’ features a combination of catchy sitar riffs, driving percussion, and uplifting traditional vocals that could turn the track into their next ‘Pistolero’-like hit. ‘Guillotine’ is sure to be a favourite amongst trancers, featuring heavy guitars (harking back to Juno’s remix of Fatima Mansion’s ‘Loyaliser’ in the ‘90s), full-frequency percussive effects, and a relentless rhythmic pulse that sounds much faster than its 141 bpm. Produced with long-time Juno collaborator Johann Bley, the track’s fusion of quasi-industrial synths, beautiful vocals, and thrash metal elements will have dance floors going off.

The surprise ear-worm of the album is ‘Trans Siberian’, which opens with a growling synth and what sounds like an intergalactic chorus singing verses similar to the famous ‘O Fortuna’ opening of Carmina Burana. (Watkins has a classical background that goes back to his early childhood.) At 125 bpm, this slower number goes incredibly deep, with syncopated synth pads and gorgeous operatic voices. Soprano Anna Gillingham delivers a sumptuous performance of ethereal beauty (reminiscent of the Diva’s performance in The Fifth Element) while bass Jeremy Birchall’s handling of lines from Rachmaninoff liturgical music broadens both the dynamic range and emotional breadth of the number. (Watkins found Gillingham by phoning up a London musical conservatory to see if there was a singer who could do what he wanted – the MA student called back and certainly delivered the goods… she’s spellbinding.)

The middle track ‘Shine’ is a downtempo piece featuring a stronger traditional Indian atmosphere, with some stellar sitar playing and vibrant percussion underscoring soaring vocals fused with electronic effects (and a few car horns). ‘Tempest’ shifts gears again, its opening errie circular synth pattern moving into a mesmerizing fusion of frenetic breakbeat rhythms, undulating basslines, and anguished synthesized wails (Kris Kylven of UX provided drum programming).

‘Zombie’ is sure to be a favourite at dance parties, incorporating a piano riff with spooky modulations, a strong kick, a vocal sample saying ‘I love you so much’, a groovy bassline, and a slow (128 bpm) but driven rhythmic pulse. The inspiration came from a party Watkins had played: “It was in the morning, and everyone had had far too many drugs. I’d finished my set and was wandering around, and people were just dancing like zombies, and I thought I should do a track about zombies… so this is for them.”

The final two tracks provide a landing pad for the journey, with ‘To Byculla’ fusing twangy sitar lines with a dubby bassline and Hamsika’s evocative Indian vocals leading into the closing ‘Playing With Fire,’ whose soft but deep blend of electronics, guitar, strings, and magisterial choral vocals reach an emotional climax before fading into oblivion.

As usual with Juno, there is a large-scale cinematic quality to the music – Watkins always paints on a big canvas and aims for symphonic, operatic, and dramatic impact. His transparent engineering, varied modulations (a refreshing change from the restricted harmonic framework usually found in trance), diverse tempi, and organic story-centered structures make this an album with multi-genre allure but without catering to the lowest common denominator. Sounds and riffs that in other hands might be less convincing are held together by a musical intregrity and cohesiveness of vision that are sadly all too rare in electronica productions.

“It’s been a long birth,” Watkins says of the release. Whatever the pains the producer went through, the result is some of the best work of his career, an album that, like the best of his opus, raises the bar and will be considered a classic for years to come.

Buy your digital copy at iTunes at http://bit.ly/11ykroc or Juno Download at http://www.junodownload.com/products/juno-reactor-the-golden-sun-of-the/2151924-02/ or on Bandcamp at https://junoreactor.bandcamp.com/album/the-golden-sun-of-the-great-east

Mark Ainley