Stock: 
Format: 
Release Date: 09-06-1997
Label: Real Music
Catalog Number: RM1431-2
Barcode: 46286143123
Musical Style: New Age
Track Listing:
| Disc 1 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gods of Olympus [04:54]  | 7 | Vision Quest [05:14] |
| 2 | Merymere Falls Trail [04:30] | 8 | Shi Beach Romance [05:49] |
| 3 | Eagle Flight [05:03] | 9 | Deep Canopy [05:51] |
| 4 | Royal Lake [03:59] | 10 | Toleak Point [04:38] |
| 5 | Kuyu Ancestors [05:24] | 11 | Sacred Land [05:27] |
| 6 | Elwha River [06:06] | ||
Description:
With orchestrations to match the majesty of the spectacular Olympic National Park, Mars Lasar's musical panoramas sweep across glacial valleys, through lyrical alpine meadows and into the secret shaded worlds of the moss-draped Northwest rainforest. It celebrates the area's earliest Native American settlers and, earlier still, the primal forces that originally shaped this ice-hewn land.
Biography:
Born in Germany, Mars Lasar (lah ZAHR) moved to Australia with his parents when he was less than a year old. He started playing the piano at age eleven and received training in classical, jazz and composition. At age fifteen he won the Young Composers Award at the Sydney Opera House. It was around this time that he also developed an interest in using computers to create music. Computers were fascinating to me because I could manipulate them to create so many different types of textures, he recalls.
Of his earliest influences Mars admits, tongue-in-cheek, I have to take my hat off to Beethoven, but he also cites such disparate performers as Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, early Van Halen, Alan Parsons, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre as sparking his musical interest. In high school he began dabbling in abstract concrete music with a friend who taped frequencies off the short wave radio and incorporated them into musical pieces, an early form of sampling. Later, Mars joined the Australian band IQ where he was discovered by the President of Fairlight Computers who hired him as the company's in-house composer. I received calls from all over the world from fans of my Fairlight compositions, he says. The exposure led to a series of free-lance commercial and soundtrack work for the likes of Chrysler-Plymouth, Duracell and Kleenex and such television shows as Baywatch, Equal Justice and This is the NFL. In 1987, Mars created the score for Sounds Like Australia, a wildlife film that employed the Fairlight in taking the sounds of nature and shaping and reworking them into music. In 1990, noted producers Hans Zimmer and Trevor Horn brought Mars to America to work on the soundtrack for the Tom Cruise film Days of Thunder. Horn then brought him in to help with an album by new artist Seal, which ended up earning a Grammy nomination.
