Four False Starts In The Painfully Slow Race To Review Hundred Million Light Years
I.
This release is one of the toughest I have ever had to review. The music is beautiful, but when I sit down to write about it, I have trouble naming any particular characteristic. I could toss around some hollow genre labels (ambient, trance, techno, etc. etc.), but the total lacuna this music leaves/creates/opens seems to merit more active criticism than rote categorization can accomplish. These are techno songs — eight-minute tracks rolling on bulky bassdrum bearings with synth effects and limpid melodies layered on top — but the shadings, the slight shifts of perspective on the same involuted sonic core, bring me back to this record again and again to see what I have missed, only to rediscover that the finding is in the forgetting. Listening to the ten songs here is like looking at a series of different versions of the same abstract painting; identifying the differences between them can be a wholly absorptive and insulating experience. This is music that doesn't (de)posit itself — the more it is itself, the less it is anything at all. This is minimalism reframed not in terms of the size or intensity of the sound, but in terms of the endurance of its effect (which is nil).
II.
Minimalism is, in effect, a kind of maximalism, and perhaps its most effective mode. The generation of negative space, the prodigious absence implies potential presence that enlarges the work in spite of itself, whereas the maximal music or object is so imposing that it can fail to evoke and allude and indicate, and is doomed to its own finite, if impressive, size.
III.
I've never found a good context for the word pulchritudinous. It's a cumbersome way of saying something is beautiful... so polysyllabically interminable that it seems an almost backhanded compliment to the object in question. The word seems entirely appropriate to describe Hundred Million Light Years, which pulses with an engorged beauty, plangent and fragile, that disappears as soon as it is named. It flits on adipose angel wings.
IV.
This music good not rememberancing the good but the good float belly if the light beams were steel in the waters I would hit them and like in the music get bloodless bruises like plum colored wallpapers on my skin.
1. Color of Feels
2. Natural Source
3. Hundred Million Light Years
4. Nobody Could Be Alone
5. We Were Born Here
6. Holding a Baby
7. Your Brilliant Flowers
8. Life Goes On
9. Universe