Sounds Reviewed #2/2011
VARGRWULF - Release
(Sweet Solitude 2011, Infinity Project 1)
(10/10 Admiration-Points)
Minimalism in Art is the attempt to achieve the most intense artistical results with the most minimal artistical means. Joseph Gates' work on the important UK based label Sweet Solitude should be seen in this tradition, since "Release" presents the most minimal and at the same time most beautiful music you can imagine. John Cage would have loved it, because the sounds are nearly inexistant. They constantly oscillate between Being and Nothingness. This constant oscillation makes "Release" to a really great work of cosmic noise, since our cosmos is also always incipient and never ever ending. Something or maybe nothing of this cosmic oscillation between Nothingness and Being seems to be preserved on "Release".
On "Release" there is almost nothing to listen to. But this almost nothing is so intense, bright and pure, that I got the impression, that the whole spectrum of light was refracted through the prism of sound. The splendor of the sun also becomes only visible through the fact, that it is refracted by the layers of the atmosphere of our planet Earth. The internal flickering of the sounds dissolves over 75 Minutes into a vibrant haze, which produces a hypnotic luminosity and an almost tactile immediacy. The sounds seem almost like painted with the subtlest shades of desert sand or ice and snow. Joseph Gates seems to be the Robert Ryman of sound when he makes all shades of white audible for us.
Ecstatic tranquility would be the most appropriate name for the state, in which the mind of the listener dives in. This music is a Dive-Through and not a Drive-Through. This music provides a stairway to your inner and outer galaxies. Its inward aesthetic opens your senses up to the cerebral pleasures of proportion, of light, of touch, of colour, of sound, of light and of silence. The radiance of the sounds releases the spirit, but the spirit always remembers the body. It almost feels like lying on a very sunny location on the beach, watching with half open eyes into the blue nothingness called sky, only slightly blinded by the sunlight. And in the end, everything will dissolve itself into a mirage and a deep slumber. Sounds will appear and disappear like cloud formations on the deep blue canvas of your innermost sensorium.
Hardness and softness, stasis and movement are in a constant but always surprising tension. An inattentive listeners would integrate the sounds into one wall, but you have to listen to this record more than once, to perceive what is going on here. Where the classical monolithic HNW-Sound tries to eliminate the time-axis of a composition by shockfrosting time to an eternal now or by stretching time almost like a balloon to produce some kind of time-bubble (or a nunc stans - if you like latin terms), Gates delivers a strange stasis in horizontal motion. He is extending the time-axis or to use another picture: he stretches a time-atom until it explodes or bursts into pieces to produce a HNW-wall fractured by light. So you can prepare yourself to listen to the most lucid, translucent and transparent HNW-sounds ever.
Ecstatic tranquility would be the most appropriate name for the state, in which the mind of the listener dives in. This music is a Dive-Through and not a Drive-Through. This music provides a stairway to your inner and outer galaxies. Its inward aesthetic opens your senses up to the cerebral pleasures of proportion, of light, of touch, of colour, of sound, of light and of silence. The radiance of the sounds releases the spirit, but the spirit always remembers the body. It almost feels like lying on a very sunny location on the beach, watching with half open eyes into the blue nothingness called sky, only slightly blinded by the sunlight. And in the end, everything will dissolve itself into a mirage and a deep slumber. Sounds will appear and disappear like cloud formations on the deep blue canvas of your innermost sensorium.
Hardness and softness, stasis and movement are in a constant but always surprising tension. An inattentive listeners would integrate the sounds into one wall, but you have to listen to this record more than once, to perceive what is going on here. Where the classical monolithic HNW-Sound tries to eliminate the time-axis of a composition by shockfrosting time to an eternal now or by stretching time almost like a balloon to produce some kind of time-bubble (or a nunc stans - if you like latin terms), Gates delivers a strange stasis in horizontal motion. He is extending the time-axis or to use another picture: he stretches a time-atom until it explodes or bursts into pieces to produce a HNW-wall fractured by light. So you can prepare yourself to listen to the most lucid, translucent and transparent HNW-sounds ever.
If you are willing to let yourself fall into a dreamlike mindstate you will be rewarded with evocation of the flickering beauty of a landscape. All of a sudden a landscape seems to appear before the eyes of your imagination.This must be the grandeur of an american landscape: from a promontory to a rock to a grain of sand. You can almost feel the inscription of a sonic microclimate of a landscape with the most elementary sound like: water, wind, fire. Or to say it simpler: you can listen to inhuman sounds, sounds that were produced by our cosmic machine called Earth. It's like the modulation of wind and the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place. One should speak of an almost geological stratification of sound. Robert Smithson wrote somewhere about the co-implication of earth, mind and thinking: "one's mind and the earth are in constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart tiny deposits of gritty reason"
When you take off your headphones after 75 minutes of pure nothingness, it seems as if all of your senses have become a lot more attentive to the sounds, which are around you all of the time. You will be surprised by the richness of these sounds. You will maybe try to listen to the "music" of your daily surroundings more closely. The sounds of cars, trains, birds, bees, dogs, cats, trees, the wind, the rain, the ringing telephone, the noise of a building site and maybe church bells will probably mix up to a very unique HNW-composition. What more can and should music achieve than sharpening our senses to listen to the human and inhuman sounds of our cosmic machine called EARTH ?
To say it with a poem by Allan Afterman called "The Desire for White":
The shell
is form -
is the dome
the skull
is the density of nothingness,
its intensity
is this thought
a wind hiding silence.
(written by S.K.G. in April/May 2011)
Since this is one of the most unique releases in HNW this year, I can only give the highest possible recommendation for Vargrwulf's "Release". I hope, that Joseph Gates will "release" a very large Multi-CD or Multi-Tape-collection full of these wonderful minimal sounds really soon. After 75 beautiful minutes and repeated listening I will need a lot more of it.
(10/10 Admiration-Points)
Vargrwulf - Release
(Sweet Solitude 2011, Infinity Series 1)
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