Artist: Celestial
Title: Navigation / Harijan
Label: Midnight Recordings
By: Simon Jones | 22 January 2003
Tracklist:

• A: Navigation
• B: Harijan

Celestial "Navigation / Harijan"

Celestial is the collective of Alexander Church and Phil Joyce, two producers who have had releases in the past on labels including Pied Piper and Gravitation. Alexander enjoyed releases on Gravitation in 2002 with the tracks 'Welcome To My World' and 'Downward Spirals', whilst Phil has the forthcoming 'Insignia' on Pied Piper to his credit. Here they come together to showcase two tracks that bring together their production ideals into one nucleus. Those tracks are 'Navigation' and 'Harijan'.

Soft atmospheric strings introduce us to 'Navigation', sliding beautifully into a futuristic edged percussion line as synths roll over and under the beats, which subtly stick to a nice pace which allows the emotive vocal to flow freely and add some warmth to the spacial ambience already present within the mix, the blissful reprise in the middle giving way to some rough edged synth arrays which add a slightly harder mood to the end part of the track, just perfect of mixing into another set builder when the time is right.

'Harijan' draws on more of a downtempo influence, with soft beats and warm chords working in tandem with the heavenly string sections, as a wailing vocal flutters like a feather in a wind amidst the mellow soundscape. Intricate analogue bleeps pepper the backdrop as the sounds all come together and just move along in laid back fashion to the end. A superb track to use in a warm up set, and one which will set the mood nicely for the evening.

As a new imprint for 2003, it's hard to know what to expect from Midnight Recordings, but if future releases are anything like this, then one would assume they aren't necessarily just aiming for the dancefloor, but also looking to experiment in the name of good music with depth and melody, which is what this release showcases in bundles.