This is the only purely electronic work I have heard from the Staern studio. If you by the wider term electroacoustic music also embrace the narrower term electronic music as one of various contemporary disciplines, then, ok, this is an electroacoustic piece. However, if you make a distinction between pure, electronic music that uses sounds generated by electric machines such as – in the older days – tone generators and – nowadays – synthesizers or any number of onboard computer software, and the utilization – perhaps in treated form – of concrete sounds of any kind, then this should be categorized as electronic music, the way a piece like Folke Rabe’s What?? is electronic, or the way John Chowning’s Turenas is.
The growling drone that emerges and grows like some alien, mechanic insect that approaches out of the distance is dissolved into a more distant, thinner and shinier, lighter and more piercing, shrill audio that skims the horizon like a shy light, like the resounding echoes of an angelic metal choir hiding in a slightly off-dimensional state, but the darker, ominous sound returns with more power and a dangerous swagger, in an electronic tutti that is purified into an ascetic state which allows for humus layer energies to appear and shake the foundations.
Ambient atmospheres open and close, flashing images of distant worlds onto the retina of perceivers everywhere. A Buddha sits crossed-legged somewhere in this music.
A short silence… and then a shocking flyby, loudly skimming your senses in sharp, gray sonorities, in a sensation of smooth metal surfaces at incalculable velocities, like sharp swords cutting the air all around your face.
When you meet someone in space, who is moving? It’s all about relativity, isn’t it, and of perspectives and ego.
At this stage, a new property is evident. I hear instruments or the likeness of instruments: oriental, Mid-Eastern instruments, in a dance figure not unlike Terry Riley’s All Night Flights spiraling into an elevated state of mind. It’s as if an electronic ecstasy has pried open a door into a deeper aspect of yourself.
A ripple – a bead of pearls – meander by and slither out into the darkness of a nocturnal moment.
A swaying drone midway in the pitches dances with a corresponding motion in a wheezing, soughing wind, which might as well be an electro-magnetic wave motion at a distance from one of the big gas spheres, Uranus or Neptune.
The dance pans all across the audible geometry, as an actual music of the ether. The birds are asleep in the dark forests of the night side of the Earth.
God is resting somewhere beyond comprehension. “Nobody feels any pain, tonight as I stand inside the rain…”
Sudden pitches rush upwards and then down, like the music of transparence of the holy hour of cow dust in Varanasi. Holy men on the riverbanks of Ganges… Benjamin Staern’s music in golden ascetics piercing the land at ear level. The houses are whitewashed in my dream.
The song recedes into space and is sucked up by the void like a subway train slithering into the mechanical darkness of a tunnel. A hushed electronic conversation lingers at a distance in alien, rippling sonorities.
Everything ends and nothing stops.
