Copyright © 2004 Old Europa Cafe
1. Q.U.E.S.T.
2. Suspense
3. Return To The Past By Silence
4. New Midnight
5. Basis Of Traur Zot
6. La Campana
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Richard Wagner believed that music was a language and thus had to be
mastered such that it expressed something other than a fascination
with itself; his operas worked like modern cinema, with layers of
imagery descending to form sets in which scenarios evolve to points
of continuity with an overriding theme inflected but not stated
throughout. In 2001, a handful of brave artists in the
ambient/industrial/organic genre took to the stage to perform live
versions of their nearly indefinable music, fortunately bypassing the
hype over "innovation" and "progression" to focus entirely on
expression. This works massively in their favor, as what is created
is a journey into the human strategy of mental symbolism in which
decisions relate to experience; fragments of our audio environment as
modern humans are spliced together to form settings which flow like a
torrent around the obstacles of perception, sweeping the listeners
into a world of sensation outside of normal context. Tendrils of
keyboard interact to form tonal patterns which underlie the machine
noises, sampled voices and street noise, and abrasive cyclic sounds
generated from electronic devices pushed to the limits of their
function. The resulting stratified attack of intermittent loops
causes the listener to pass through different perceptions caused by
the coincidence of ideas, a device which is powerful for initially
capturing all sensory input and then creating paths through the
perceptive filters of sound as environment. Not easily expressed,
this concept changes sound from "object of attention" to "object of
changing awareness," as one passes walls going between rooms and
becomes aware, below the level of articulation, of that change, or as
one exits a forest and upon looking into a canyon is struck by the
infinite space of blue sky. Here however is a post-postmodern
fulfillment of the promise of both opera and industrial music, as
humans master machines and use the consequent greater flexibility to
make music that is only partially notes and thus can wield greater
subtlety than that possible in the world of rigidly-defined
absolutes. In escaping this purity of function, these musicians have
found a higher artistic function not only for music but for the
experience of audial art itself, and in these works we see the
beginnings of a new culture that has been here everywhere that
existential heroism has been in evidence. There is no reliance on
percussion and call-response format to lead these songs; both of
those implements are too linear, too much of a single voice outside
of the human mind, to be useful. Nor are there any consistent vocals,
although there are sampled guest vocalists plentifully. Postmodernism
hoped to take art and science into the individual, but faltered when
it lost its heroism in favor of a moral absolute of the individual,
but this music in its vastness even dwarfs the individual, and takes
the listener straight into the poetry of circumstance and the
unfolding adventure of exploring inner mental space. As such this
perverts universalism and individualism alike, blending those
absolute viewpoints into something more organic and inexplicable.
Wagner would be proud of the way this art homes in on the essential
drama of life in many voices, yet keeps those voices lucid in their
particularity. One might think this is random art except when
considering the way drama is presented here, not as a sudden jagged
declaration but as a slow realization emerging from the periphery of
consciousness, like falling asleep on a train crossing from a port
city to the mainland.
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