Three months.  That’s how long I’ve been dreaming.  Sometimes, when you dream, you jolt awake.  You’ve been falling.  Sometimes you wake up, sometime in the early morning, and you can’t feel your arms.  You slept on them.  Sometimes you wake up, and you’ve no sense of place.  No recollection of location.  You’ve lost it.  Times when sunlight is xenophobic, the paleness of its grimace seems alien, foreign, like a hypochondriac at rest.  When the fleeting glance of a beautiful girl is as devouring and inexplicable as the rising shore – casted eyes, deep rhythms, a sense of weightlessness.  A timeless ambiance, an escape, transference.  The melodious, harmonic crashing of Helios.

Sometimes you wake up.  You’re not sure why, but you do.  You recognize it.  Sometimes you pull off at the wrong exit.  Sometimes, you write your lovers name down as your own, their name on the front of your mind.  Sometimes, when thinking of her, I respond with “two please”, even when I’m alone.  It doesn’t matter.  I’m lost, placeless, evading my permeating reality.  Escaping the weight of my own.  This is the sound of Helios; an escape without a means, a constant reminder of her, of my own longing, of a love that pervades in me with every ounce of being.

Eingya is Helios’ sophomore album, but I’d like to start with this one.  Perhaps his most respected, revered, and highly rated album, even.  On the surface, this is one of those perfect elevator pieces, with its meandering acoustical melodies and soft, twinkly ambient overtones.  Bird chirping samples would even suggest its own self-parodied pretention, what’s more obvious in a blissed-out ambient piece than birds?  It’s precise in its execution, stringent, even static, in its deployment and structure.  His flow is transparent when juxtaposed to other works in the genre, his melodies without excitation, exact in their prose and repetitious in their emotional lull.  But Helios is not an exacting claim, nor an exclamation point, nor an impression on time, but rather a reflection of timelessness.  What Helios does is provide the softness and methodical beauty of transient soundscapes – a divide, a soft lull, an incomprehensible tug towards something so very distant, so very trivial, delicately entwined in the rifts of time.  For Years And Years and Bless This Morning Year are perhaps two of the most perfect ambient pieces composed on this album.  Slow, nostalgic, deep churning melodies that drone on, but unlike Helios’ cousins in the ambient genre ( Nadja, for example ) they sputter in for only a fraction of a moment.  These songs do not need to reach outwards towards the +20 minute mark.  Their intent is not to immerse the listener in the textual reverb and flow of the sounds, but rather provide a foundation of nostalgia, of memory.  To wander around an open-house.  And like a good painting, like a perfect kiss, like the hum of your loves afterglow, stamps itself in everlasting memory.

Caesura is the third album released by Keith Kenniff under the Helios moniker.  If anything, this is an extension of what Eingya is.  His usage of kicks and electronic rhythms is more predominant, but his methodology is still moving in the same direction.  Twinkly melodies, low drum notes, some kicks to path a track.  It feels more like a composite piece than a dwindling rumination a la Eingya.  Ideas are more obvious and figurehead the albums themes; elevator music for transnational elevators.  Sounds and harmonies that complement sunsets over distant canopies; the nirvana of a touch, a soft gesture.  A smile.  His experimentation is incredibly welcomed and increases the replayability of the album, and, if anything, results in the greatest track on the album: A Mountain of Ice. A slow, harmonious build into a beautiful fragment of clean, plodding kicks with the slight whisper of melody.  It heeds the call of his prior album; romanticizing with memory.

I don’t have much to say about Unomia, but I recommend giving it a listen after the aforementioned two.  It’s good, but underdeveloped. His maturity in both composition and execution is young, and it lacks the finely tuned polish of his follow ups.  As expected.

I want to express, once again, how fulfilling these albums are when taken as such.  Music for warm summer nights when your friends are out and the house is empty and the sun is sinking just below the horizon.  The phone might ring, but you won’t answer.  Birds chirp outside a window somewhere, probably in a tree.  Being birds.  The swooshing pass of a car.  The scream of children at play, chasing one another in the streets, dancing in and out of nightlight shadows.  The distant kick of a pop can.  A knock on the door that you don’t answer.   But it’s okay.  Because you’ve already forgotten all about that.

Grotesque rings true to the name and cover it touts – unnatural miserablists wading through impatience, death, fragmented shivers of atmospheric revival and tension, stirring, exuberant overtures and creepy chamber interludes.  The album oozes atmosphere in many of the ways Vacuum did, but on a much less effective level.  Tracks are not built around chords, riffs, styles or moods.  In fact the entire structure of the album really doesn’t expose itself until the fourth or fifth track.  With the opening two/three tracks, we’re dragged into a shuffling audience, observing, from below.  The band is up on stage between two medieval statues, set to the backdrop of a midfall festival.  It’s cloudy, slightly pale, and the rain is withheld – momentarily.  The crowd is this aggregation of inmates; diseased, copulating corpses.  Graveyard poets.  The band is stringing their instruments, the interlude protrudes.  A soft, delicate ambiance breezes through the crowd, stricken with awe.  Emotion permeates the air.  All is silent.  The crescendo explodes in an emphatic rupture – faces now ablaze with sincerity and passion.  The track ends, the crowd erupts.  These types of introductions are always so incredibly important to an album for setting the forthcoming tone.  Stanley Kubrick once said the first ten minutes of a film are the most important, and the exact same rings true for music.  Without an introduction, there is no album.  Without that deployment of setting and soundscape, there really is no catalyst between listener and music.  Thus far, Vaerohn is two for two with album interludes and mood derivation.

The second song ( and the third ) employs this disastrously dynamic structure between sound and ambiance, alternating his percussive nuances with this avant-garde blast beating.  I guess it’s an interesting way to sort of explore the complexities of horror/neogothic soundscapes and his ( however tenuous ) orchestrated classical bits, but the way its strung together feels too loose.  Both of these tracks build through this exhausting trudge of stop/go rhythms, classical acoustics, and rampant black metal, but nothing is ever very striking.  The mood is stretched much too thinly – momentum with blasting diminished and castrated by interludes, interludes never really given their respect to indulge the listener.  Too fleeting?  Perhaps, but Vaerohn is never one to really deploy his atmosphere in a mood-driven way; most of his ambiance tends to be nothing more than a slight fervor, a moment of stillness that escapes itself.  The fourth track brings about his exceptional talent for this fleeting ambiance, and is borderline DSBM – a striking melody, desperate vocals, a sense of complete submersion.  It’s easily one of the finest tracks on the album.

The rest of the album sort of regurgitates the structure above – it’s less of a concept piece and more of a meditation on sound/style regression.  There’s almost always a sort of moody ambiance floating about before, during, and after tracks ( sometimes bleeding into one another ), but it’s never really USED.  That’s my biggest issue with this album.  There’s so many wonderful experimental sounds gushing around the edges, but they’re only hinted at, merely suggested.  On top of that, he attempts to snag just about everything surrounding his sound at once.  There’s simply no structure to progress a track, it just bumps and grinds around to hit all of his doctored preconceptions; it almost becomes frustrating.  Hel is the most guilty track of losing itself to its own notions of experimentation.  It’s literally a repetition of the bm/ambiance/bm/ambiance/ambient bridge/bm/close structure.  It’s ineffective and disgustingly dull.

In short, Grotesque is an album of innumerable and glaring downfalls, but one that presents nothing but an opportunity.  I’m still awaiting Vaerohn’s masterpiece, and believe that, soon enough, and with enough patience with himself and his music, we’ll be brought an unrequited, monumental album of such unimaginable brilliance.  If his debut is of any indication, his classical nuances are incredibly well rounded, as is, for the most part, his ability to conjure emotion and create the catalytic moodpieces necessary to delve the listener into the self.  To explore.  To explore the recreance conscious of thought.  You’re almost there, Vaerohn.

Nebraska is a state delusional of its own importance.  We’re a small cavity of space hollowed out in the side of a mountain, with a small, thriving ecosystem and miles of wide open farmfields.  We don’t usually get films here, let alone anything worth seeing. We have two indie theaters – small, complacent, almost desolate buildings with a few hanging strings and some film posters.  IRREVERSIBLE played at one such theater on Friday night.  I knew I had to be there.

The film started at midnight (they play cult films at midnight), and I arrived about 11:50.  There was one other person there, sitting somewhere in the middle.  The next ten minutes were filled with silence – it’s one of those theaters that refuses to play music in the lobby, if only to exaggerate their timely aging.  Around 11:58, a stout couple walked in with a bag of popcorn and sat somewhere off the right of me.  I knew that within the hour, they’d be gone.  A group of girls walked in (by group, i mean two) and sat in front of me.  Yeah, they’d probably be gone too.

There’s an eloquence and calming demeanor about this theater that’s inexplicable.  I can’t quite describe its gestures.  It’s a rundown, 50′s type place with one screen.  They’ve got an amazing sound system and a pretty nice screen, complimented by its aging, tearing seats smothered in years of abuse.  They cater to the indie crowd, unfortunately, by playing obvious cult classics night after night with the occasional gem.  Neverthless,  it’s a honey pot of cinematic glorification, and I return to that which is sweet.

The film started promptly at midnight.  I don’t want to bother describing the films plot,  but that which is of importance.  That which defines cinema.  They jacked the volume up, and I settled in for roughly two hours of cerebral ecstasy.  The sound system roared to life as the title slowly clambered onto the screen, the distant humming and bassy reverb shaking the theater.  This is how such films are meant to be viewed.  As most of you know, the first hour or so is arguably the films finest and most intense.  The sounds, the visuals, the agonizing depiction of time, tossed up in a blistering collage of homosexuality, rape, and love.  There’s something to be said about the films contemplative aesthetics.  Specifically, the employment of a nauseating 28Hz signal and fragmented, jittery cinematography, quasi handheld.  The film begins where I STAND ALONE left off, exhaustingly employing the disembodied camera angels, bright, washed out lights and 28Hz humming.  This humming is unbelievably essential to the films nauseating power.  Sound is inescapable.  We can turn our eyes away at sights of disgust, but to escape the audible torture one must leave the theater, forfeiting their draw into the world Noe’s crafted.  My love for the audible madness is due in part to my taste in music.  nothing is more rewarding than losing yourself in the noisey, dreamy sensation of immense, reverb-ridden wall-of-sounds.  The drone.  Finding beauty in endless recursion.  Noe employs this rhythmic repetition both in terms of the sounds he creates and the structure of the film.  Inside the Rectum, Noe really leaves much of the imagery and happenings to our imagination.  The camera twists and turns and glides in and out of dim lights, homosexual activities, dark corners and unlit corridors.  We’re focusing ourselves on the resounding echo of turmoil, the disgust and catatonic rage swelling up around us.  The 28Hz drone continues to bubble on as they delve deeper into the cavernous oblivion of disdain, faces bleeding in and out of shots, everything so quick and out of focus it becomes nothing but a rigid blur.  The final few moments of the film, however, is where it really comes alive.  Unfortunately it doesn’t do much to enhance the film or the narrative or the characters, it only serves as a final shove out of his consciousness and into our own.  It reminds me of the ending in A NEW LIFE.  This turbulent, successive building of sounds that finally releases itself in the magnitude of nothingness.

Finally, we approach the rape scene.  The two women in front of me catch only a brief hint of what’s to come, and quickly scamper out.  I look back and notice the couple already gone.  it’s only me and another guy a few rows back.  Tension increases until the scene finally straggles in.  silence permeates the air.  The camera holds stagnant in eternity, momentarly suspending time for a brief rupture of a moment, if only to allow such an event to occur.  Because it has to.  The films beauty is derived from this one scene, this very act.  This is something that must take place, it has already been decided.  The films content and story slowdives into an insoluble poignancy at this point, as its narrative rolls back the tables of time another few hours.  We’re left alone, in the humbling entrancement of the banal, justifying the means to a disgusting end.  The characters continue to rewind themselves; we’re allowed to replay them.  Subtle gestures are accentuated not by means of the film, but by the consciousness of the viewer.  This is where the films power lies.  It’s been said a million times before, but the transitory, instability of time and those caught within is something of indiscreet beauty and terror.  We know not what lies ahead; we’re the same wilderness we’ve always been, blindly gashing forward in spite of ourselves.  Because we must.  We must move forward if only to discover ourselves.

I’d seen the film a good four or five times beforehand, but everything after the rape scene continues to conjure up swelling emotion.  An unbearable, indescribable gnawing that threatens every moment of every day.  We’ve learned to cope with the unknown without suffering its effects, but this film lies in the fourth dimension.  All angles, all opportunities, all threads are exposed with gaping wounds.  the playfulness and closeness between the two is something of a cinematic anomaly; something so prestine and pure is rarely captured (it helps that both were married in real life at the time).  The small, enthusiastic gestures felt between the two would suggest that which does not exist; forever.  It’s moments such as the shower scene that induce melancholic longing and narrative appreciation.  The inexorable framework of our seams exists because it must.

The last shot we see is her reading the book she mentioned in the elevator on time.  her contemplation on premonitions.  A narrative hint into the fourth dimension; a door unknowingly ignored.  The very last scene ruptures and jolts to a halt – kicking us out and leaving us to wander.  I stood up knowing that the film was over, but the fellow behind me wasn’t quite sure.  He sat long after i’d left.

The theater is about thirty minutes away from my home, a quick pacing through suburban emptiness and streetlights.  Something both wonderful and terrible about nebraska is the nightlife – it doesn’t exist.  I drove halfway across town and saw only a handful of cars, and this is on a friday night.  It’s comforting and beautiful, however, driving briskly down a highway completely alone, under the streetlamps and crecent moon.  It’s stabalizing.  It’s a time when streetlights all blink in rapid succession, all choosing the same colors.  Nobody is biking, no one out walking, no buses stopping.  It’s in this depth of night, within the inexorable nature of itself, of the universe, that moments are truly defined.  It’s irreconcilable.  Time destroys all.

Some films capture fragments of brilliance and unscathed beauty, and those moments are inarguably and immediantly recognizable. The opening scene of WERKMEISTER HARMONIES, the final shot of NOSTALGHIA, the restaurant scene of PLAY TIME. Some films work hard and strive to achieve these things, slowly building characters to ease in situations, weaving and guiding as they approach a demise or resolution. MAROBOSI is collage of these invaluable moments, captured static shots, inescapably gazing, inarguably monumental. The sheer breadth of emotion the film traverses is breathtaking, put beautifully into perspective by wonderful acting and mesmerizing visuals. The film is like an array of pictures, glued together around the edges and hung up in an empty room. The love of someones life commits suicide, leaving behind a three month old child and wife that clings to his every thought. Their relationship seemed sound and he seemed mentally stable, but a glint of melancholy lurked behind his face. Even if we’re not shown his expressions very often, traces are still abound. I think it was completely epitomized in the last scene he’s in, slowly trotting off with his umbrella. Kicking his feet side to side, head down and pace uneasy.

After the suicide, she’s matched up with another man that lives in a small town, wintery and blustery. Desolate. A scene beside the sea. From here on, the film mingles through her attempted reconciliation. Emptiness and vastness overcome her, bits and fragments exfoliate themselves with every passing moment, captured and framed methodically somewhere between her and her newfound love. A facade of happiness bounces between the two, yet their love is merely cathartic and guilt-driven, lacking the passion they once had. Each seeking solace in tangible reflections of their own melancholy, again methodically captured by space and time. Time, however, passes rather quickly in the beginning as the film goes on its way. You’d hardly notice it if the child hadn’t magically grown several years in the matter of a cut. A somber parade passes her somewhere near the end of the film, a coffin carried by several men, those grieving somewhere behind. She wanders into line, around the end and spaced distantly between. The snow lightly falling, the funeral apparatus marching onwards as predestination begins to take over. As the line disappears off screen (arguably the most recognizable screenshot from the film), we’re presented with one of the most desolate images I’ve ever seen. This gaping void of loneliness is everything we strive to avoid. Sometimes, however, this emptiness is inescapable.

94%

Note:  I don’t know who’s out there or cares to read my thoughts, but I’ve gotten a few emails regarding my absence and thank you deeply for inquiring.  I had no idea people read anything I wrote.  I may begin writing full length reviews again, sometime.

Words will do no justice.  Vibrant oil paintings of life, distant and fleeting, momentary glimpses of aesthetic exhileration.  The brief climatic sequences of death; a humble, caring son torn and distraught in grief over the inevitable death of his mother.  A dreary, melancholic adventure, almost dream-like, unreal in moments and completely humanistic in others.  Essential.

92%

Vacuum is an eclectic album, consisting of many different sounds and venues that the melodies pay homage to.  Predominantly, the album is driven by remorse and melancholy, but a lingering sense of permutation tinges the atmosphere throughout its entirety.  Vacuum is heavily inspired by the bleak yet endearing sounds of classical tunes, a minimalistic symphony for the desolate, morose individuals that berate existence.  Scattered throughout the album are piano interludes and classical instrumentation, both being utilized quite well, but not without their depreciation.  The opening track trembles in like a record, instantaneously sweeping us away with a string and piano-laden melody, yet just as quickly transitioning into the shrieking hate-filled fields of depressive black metal.  The black metal fragments of the album are just as the listener would expect.  Higher pitched vocals and resilient, overbearingly toxic riffs that ricochet off one another, bounce around the album sporadically and systematically, almost unnaturally.  The atmospheric segments that these bits collide with seem to be superficial paradigms, like sidewalk chalk in the rain they stand individual without support, yet when the rains begin to fall their value swiftly fades away.  It almost feels contrived the way some of it is incorporated.  It doesn’t seem to enhance the musical quality or the listeners tone, simply another unnoticed extra in some obscure foreign film.

The one stand out track that really irritated me, and ultimately brought about a change in thought, was Coup De Bleus.  I found it be the one track that really deprived me of understanding the entirety of the album.  Depressive black metal is an extremely variable genre subject to instantaneous and sweeping changes, like street lights from red to green it can change on a dime.  But in doing so, you put at risk the listeners overall textual feel of the album.  You risk removing them from the world and atmosphere you’ve so meticulously crafted, and quite possibly ruining the entire experience.  The opening three tracks of Vacuum are fantastic epitaphs of depressive black metal; layered and atmospheric, treacherous and dreary.  The instinctive flow of classical tunes and black metal riots clash and embrace in a soaring vacuum of isolation.  And then Coup De Bleus begins, and you begin to wonder if you haven’t been transported back to the 1930s, sitting in a gloomy cafe with intellects and men in suits.  The track has a heavy blues feel to it, almost optimistic and hopeful, like I want to order another coffee and snap my fingers along.  The track does pick back up into the depressive black metal arena, and it almost really does feel like a brand new song, but in that it loses its scope.  It’s too fragmented and impatient with itself, losing its direction too many times in a song removes the listener completely.  Other than this one stand out track, the rest of the songs feel at rest.  They tend to caress one another like Mozart or Beethoven would, certain distinct melodies appear to dance about in other tracks, making the entire album feel as though it is one instead of multiple.

Pensees Nocturnes’s debut album is one of many ideas, each taking two steps forward and one step backwards.  The classical bits are very well done, incorporated unconventionally into the music as stagnant bits of emotion, breathing deeply and exhaling throughout.  The albums bleeding melodies exude sorrow; weep down upon the entirety of the album like melting icicles atop a tin roof.  Depressive black metal is seen as a genre that’s stagnating, as more and more bands throw their material into a cannibalized genre, innovation is in dire need.  Bands like Pensees Nocturnes affirm that this stagnation isn’t as static as it seems, that renovation and innovation aren’t as distant as we believe.  Because even distance is relative, even hope is subjective, because the vaccination of existence is endowed within albums like these.  They inoculate each and every listener with despair and futility, slowly breeching through insecurities and dreams, past the drivel and nonsensical fragments of meaningless emotions and thoughts.  As you begin to reflect and ponder, reminisce and conceive, you realize existence has already passed you by.  And now you are here.  Now you are here.  Now you are here.

82%

The Narrow Path is the first full length album by Licht Erlischt, a rather obscure black metal band from Norway.  After a relatively above average demo and several spurts of wordless disappearances, the album was finally released into the crowd.  Much like the demo, The Narrow Path is a melodic overture, gagged and bound in a trunk of lonely and forgotten scales and notes.  Instruments without musicians, keys without fingers, a track without the compassion or touch of an artist.  The album is completely bound to these melodies, dependent on each and every one to progress the track in directions it would’ve otherwise completely missed.  Now, I love melodies more than anyone.  They’re quite possibly the most emotive pieces of work that a human being is capable of creating, and rivaled only by visual stimulus.  But when an artist centers his structure and form based upon a melodic arrangement of chords, there are certain directions that simply do not work.  The Narrow Path epitomizes this direction, taking a melody and wrapping it into a philosophical metamorphosis, shifting and twisting as it inevitably progresses forward.  It seems he simply doesn’t understand the fact that songs end, that songs are much like our lives.  We fade in and fade out, most of our time spent dead or unborn.  Within these fleeting moments we’re given, we must accomplish all we desire.  Not all we’re told to, not all we’re supposed to, but all we desire to.  Radiance, for example, is one of the weaker tracks on the album.  Indeed the melody is quite good, but the song simply lacks direction.  It builds, it builds, and eventually ends, ends its dismal existence with nothing more than a putter, a tear, and a final melody.

The Narrow Path is far from amateur, and the songs in their entirety are far from weak or vague.  Melody, as previously noted, is layered throughout the album.  It simply gushes with melancholy.  The tracks are long and slow, but the melodies are sweeping and despondent.  Nerrath’s vocals are Burzum-esque, but not quite as raspy and a bit higher.  Rather uninspired, they lack the somber emotion of the rest of the album.  In The Offshore Oaks, he even includes clean vocals, and they fit the track perfectly.  Mood and atmosphere play an important role for the album, and the melodies just continue to pour down.  With more of a structured tone and a bit more thought, this could’ve been an outstanding release.  The Vaultventurer, for example, boasts a very melancholic melody, and Await The Overarching Blow begins amazingly subversive.  They both, however, fall into the same stale fragmentation, a lack of direction.

Licht Erlischt’s The Narrow Path is far from a terrible album, it’s simply lacking in direction.  The melodies are mournful, treacherous crawls through rain-drenched streets and coves.  They’re the philosophical anecdotes of mankind, of existence and time.  They tread beaten paths of disappointment and success, unknowingly recreating existence and error.  Deceit, sorrow, suffering;  all fragments of melody.  Composition is the glue that binds these emotive works of being together, entwines the listener into the world they’ve created.  Without them, music is senseless drivel, a scapegoat for existence.  A moniker for melodic suicide.  A distant, melancholic melody that breathes in the distance, captured and coveted and strung up.  Vastness embraces it, reconstructs it, and rewinds it.  Why piece together the fragments of melody – beauty, sorrow, despair; the stagnated bits and pieces you never bothered to notice?

71%

Title: The Double Life Of Veronique
Release Date: 1991
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

“When we stroll through a street at night, and a man, already visible from far away (for the street rises in front of us and there is a full moon), comes running toward us, we will not grab hold of him, even if he is weak and ragged, even if someone is running after him and yelling; we will simply let him run on.
For it is night, and we cannot help it if the street rises in front of us in the full moon, and besides: perhaps these two people are staging the chase for their own amusement, perhaps the two of them are pursuing a third, perhaps the first man is being pursued through no fault of his own, perhaps the second one wants to murder him, and we will be accomplices to the murder, perhaps the two of them know nothing of one another, and each is simply running home to bed on his own account, perhaps they are sleepwalking, perhaps the first man is armed.
And anyway, don’t we have the right to be tired, haven’t we drunk a lot of wine?  We are glad that we no longer see the second one either.“

-Franz Kafka

99%