As it were, Lieven Martens Moana begins Idylls on Pacificity Soundvisions with an overture. Stumbling to afoot balance, drifting. A drift. Alone. Witnessing the song of solo. A character in multiple characters manipulating the conscious character. That bashed brain chimpanzee-Shakespeare concept. Architecture without. Idylls is In a Silent Way, deserted on a rotating island in an ocean of GJ 1132b, thousands of cryogenic light-years from now. Where genius is found of self but nobody’s around to witness, so genius compels genius in an ouroboros of contentment.
Nothing but space, where time had sought. Cracked lips. Imagine being a fine-fruited bowl resting atop the sun-soaked harmonium — upon a singular sandy-beach sliver. Taking the tide. With tuxedo-tailored classics, Idylls is the lost paradise of flourishing nature-meets-improv. The genius of “primitive”: Lieven Martens Moana. Feeling ownership of one’s time in the crackles of wind and ivory turn-key. Savoring the acceptance of being in an uncontrollable situation, dreaming intently. Being there just enough to taste it, but plight never felt like a swan song.
Lieven Martens Moana has a life-partner and a child, from what I can tell on Instagram and on his label’s website, Edições CN. This is where I can decipher Idylls literally, finding influence of all types of rustic living, humbly, as a family man in Belgium, where Lieven lives. Interestingly enough, his fascination with island life and oceanic tour structures, followed (naturally) by containment — reflecting the feeling of almost being alone, but not at all — presents his own “comment on ethnography, an exotic illustration and a ritual,” as he puts it. The atmosphere of complete archaic intellectualism breathes life into the idea that a modern balance of design exists in minimal orchestration.
Typically, one thinks of being left alone as relaxing. But for indefinite amounts of time, loneliness appears a little haunting. With bare synthetics, caverns of scaled electronics, mucks deep in sinking ambient decay, broken-down rawness, and signature auteurism, Lieven Martens Moana switches on a duality between home-life and living-alone that is complemented in harmonious movements. Idylls is the hermit’s fantastic opera. It serves as inspiration to get out and pub up a few beers, or head to the closest island and find something ancient (whether real or imagined), or close the door to your room and lose track of yourself completely. As guru to apprentice: complete release relies on the death of ego before separation of selves can coalesce in harmony.
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