I like music. I like it because there seems to be a sound for everything you will ever think or feel. It doesn't require a ten year musical degree to understand the ideas you're listening to. You can space to a droning atmosphere or dissect riffs or do just about anything you want with it with little experience at all. But there's one kind of music that is tantamount to every other brand, a kind of music that transcends the definition of music. That music is the music that transports you into a different world. It's the music that dissolves reality and places you into its own dimension. It is its own setting and its own landscape. Its power is not to entertain but to consume and require that every vibration and every singular sound be given the utmost attention. It doesn't require that you seek its meaning or expend any energy trying to understand. It is only here to inspire the mind to shed the shackles of being and fly towards the vastness of its own world.
This is what
Black Earth does.
Bohren & Der Club of Gore, in creating this collection of music, have fashioned not just an album but an entire chronicle of musical notes. It's slow and deliberate presentation set at the pace of a shadowy and sexy noir film makes any reality melt away at the beckoning hand of its sounds. The dimly lit streets of a dark and heavy cityscape ooze the atmosphere of the introspective piano and the creamy saxophone drowned in dreamy ambience and plunge the mind into something as dark as it is seductive. Its crawling tempo seeks not to rouse or to energize but to spark a deep contemplation, a kind of dialogue with the soul. The ethereal twisting of the saxophone is reminiscent of a lone, mysterious vehicle creeping along under the glow of the sleeping neighborhood, not seeking anything more than to simply exist and enhance what lies ahead.
There is no evil here. It's not the darkness of feigned malevolence or hatred. The gloom of the winding woven passages of
Black Earth is a journey to a catharsis, a hopeful voyage across the iron and steel fortress of night towards the dawn of something new. There is nothing here to confuse or confound. Its deliberate simplicity speaks more than the soaring melodies of any large scale orchestra or technical musical achievement ever could. It is the soundtrack to the soul, something only a very few musicians have ever achieved. No matter the background of the listener, no matter the level of intellect or comprehension that person holds, everyone will find some truth in the musical lines of
Black Earth. It is music in its purest and simplest form, free from the pretensions of the modern views of art. Nothing yet exists that is quite like the sounds captured in this recording, and it will be quite some time before anything reaches the ground on which
Bohren & Der Club of Gore have tread with
Black Earth.
