By now I imagine most lovers of ambient music who read reviews on this site are familiar with Hollan Holmes. On 'Sacred Places,' his third album for Spotted Peccary, he offers eleven geographic vignettes, with each composition inspired from Holmes’s travels to different locales of deep personal significance. Here, Holmes blends ornate sequencer passages with tribal ambient flourishes that are intricate yet intimate, all to transcribe amazing landscapes in the listener’s mind. "Order Out of Chaos" begins with lightly arpeggiated sequencing that carries into fuller orchestrated ambience. Synth pads swell rising and falling like ocean waves while sort of sub-theme is woven in but the sequencer is still dominant. "Temples of Stone" brings more melodic elements to the ambience, and with the 4/4 bass note underneath, it adds some tension and also an allusion to progressive rock, without being rock at all. On "Bristlecone" the sequencer takes a back set to the melody and the track is all the better for it. "Drawn To An Intangible Energy" seemed somewhat transitory leading into the more fully realized "An Elevated Life." I like the way Holmes builds the composition form the bottom up, making way for Bill Porter's rockin' guitar riffs, a definite highlight of the album.

"Hallowed Ground" brings bass to the foreground as sequencers melodically dance on the top. "Walking Among Kings" has an element of trance to it, but I suppose really walking among kings could put you in a trance. "The Divine Connection" really ups the melodic aspect of the music in a symphonic atmosphere still with the sequencer setting the pace. After that, a lower key track like "Primal Instinct" is in order to chill a bit. The last two tracks- "A Light Unto The World" and "Sacred Places" were more new agey and dynamically disappointing than the rest in my opinion, mellowing out what had the potential to be a really powerful album. Over all though, a rewarding listen. For this album Hollan used a variety of hardware and software instruments, including the Oberheim OB-6 and Moog Prodigy hardware synthesizers as well as Propellerhead Reason and Spectrasonics Omnisphere software synthesizers.