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Claustrum - Return to the Past by Silence

Claustrum - Return to the Past by Silence
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

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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