Generally known as an ambient minimalist, utilizing synthesizers for most of his work, this time M. Griffin took advantage of "real world" sounds, captured with binaural microphones using a portable digital audio recorder. For this release, Griffin built up collages of numerous location recording elements, including cars driving on freeways, people walking in long echoing hallways, the ocean waves in Kona at night, a metalworking factory with heavy machinery crunching away, distant trains, and clothes driers. These elements were manipulated, combined, worked-on and re-worked, and overlaid with looped spoken elements later created by Griffin in the studio. The end result comes out something like the Zoviet France soundtrack to a David Lynch film, that is, a dark and dream-like collage of loops, spoken fragments, disembodied whispers, and the echo of far-off machinery.
This album was composed by German cult favorite Peter Thomas and contains the score for Erinnerungen an Die Zukunft, a documentary based upon a best-seller by Erich Von Daniken that proposed the theory that mankind's ancestors were aliens who landed on this planet centuries ago. The resulting soundtrack album is not easy for the listener to assimilate, primarily because it consists of two side-long medleys patched together from several unrelated musical cues. The medleys aren't arranged in a smooth, flowing fashion, and the album probably would have made an easier listen if it had been broken down into a better programmed set of individual tracks. Programming quibbles aside, Chariots of the Gods (Erinnernungen an Die Zukunft) is still pretty impressive…