I’m an optimist.
So when I listen to something like Ross Birdwise’s Eschatology (Collapsed Structures), I have to wonder how many others like me are out there. See, Birdwise the electronic manipulator of sonic moods seems to have a “growing sense that many of us may not have much of a future, or at least not the future we might have thought we had when we were young.” I don’t know about you, but I have a mortgage, a 401k, and a sense that what I’m doing is productive and sustainable, such as eating right and recycling. I’m also a jogger.
I focus on what I can focus on, right? I can’t take the weight of the entire world on my shoulders. But because I’m an optimist, I’m eternally pushing toward the goal of a future not envisioned by Ross Birdwise. If I was absorbed by “eschatology” — contemplating the events directly leading to the end of mankind, death, judgment, etc., like the rapture, which is totally going to happen but which I don’t have to worry about, of course — I’d probably be a lot more freaked out right now.
Still, Eschatology, ahem, “enraptures” me, and I find myself caught up in its composition, its DNA. Regardless of its intentions, its attempt to “evoke desolate spaces, times, tensions, and conflicts,” I can get into it, its ideas, its motifs. Even something as disorienting and foreboding as “Lopsided Soundtrack for the End Times” has its own tangential beauty. The chilly fractals of “Dawn of a New Ice Age” have me reaching for my warmest parka. The metallic jags of “Multiple, in Tension, Marching” crackle regally. The decay and ruin of “Eschatology” are breathtaking in their emptiness.
I think I’m won over.
With decay and ruin.
…I’m an optimist, dammit!
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