If only Leeloo knew, music can yield a MultiPass to a portal of whereabouts otherwise inaccessible. Supporting a wisdom unlike any surmised by the representations of literature or visual image, it has the supernatural capacity to voice the heart of a particular moment or carry fascinating telltales of times to come. Even still, the coextending portrayal of music criticism — as well as the image — can offer its own possibilities. The hopeless endeavor to equate music with words, on one hand, is countered by the otherwise hopeful promise of its own imagining territories, however fantastical they might be.
It’s not my preferred yearning to think up genre or classify Copper Vale to this degree, but to attest an estimation of it with an appreciation of music’s pervasive ability to grant access to imaginative emotional and aesthetic domains, which act as their own protagonist. “Mesa Gate” provides one of few instances in Copper Vale of typical melodic narrative, as a general mise-en-scène takes center stage — a textural, pastoral montage akin to Yearning Kru’s visual aesthetic.
Copper Vale’s central figure is its own landscape, its own geographical, historical, social, cultural, and moral context, which transforms as we too set it in new contexts — through listening, reflecting, reviewing, and rethinking — in turn contributing to the proliferation of new domains, as rapidly dividing cells. It offers a passing look at the systems by which worlds are built, a power plant of engines and dynamos forever toiling and churning, mirroring our own labor and trade, but invariably offering a glimmer of hope in the seemingly grim darkness of industrialization.
Albeit inspired by sci-fi and fantasy, Copper Vale is clearly without the typical presence of centaurs, sphinxes, or other legendary animals (apart from some abnormal birdsong in “Sarnath”), nor does it depict magic or the paranormal, per se. Rather, Copper Vale’s supernatural is its superlative degree of nature, of action taking place within society, peer-to-peer, exploring the nonetheless scaly influence of politics and technology in a struggle for survival, much like cohort Brood Ma’s DAZE. And while fantasy, like game, is frequently rendered in opposition to substantial matters of humanity, its social processes seep through (you can even hear the drips as it oozes gradually through the porous “Tin Man”).
Unlike the high-fidelity of parallel artists, Yearning Kru’s sound is more humane, but the percussive cogs with which it turns, stuttering and grating, also amplify cultivation. The apprehensive drums of “Apple Dredger,” for instance, reflecting an uneasy readiness to transform, are an eternal reflection of the state of humanity; Copper Vale isn’t science fiction, necessarily, but a folk tale of ancient stories — of fantasy and imagination — relevant to the present world of integral corporate interests and power axes, which too return the middle ages (see “Tslasher” and “Freckles on the Pain Amplifier”). At the very least, Copper Vale affords an ecological perspective on a world — be it musical or otherwise — as a dynamic entity, a valley of lustrous elements burning and glowing as fuel that sustains the machine.
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