Review Summary: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love [To] Bomb
I don’t know anything about music, I now realise. I’m an idiot on an endless and futile quest to pigeonhole things. You, Schizophrenic Symphony, delight in evading me, beating and prodding at confusion until its face is one that resembles clarity. You make me feel a bit stupid, a bit enlightened, a bit like neither of things matter very much. I’m scared there are parts of you I will never pick up on; maybe I’ll be one-hundred listens deep and I’ll stumble across a quirk that has somehow jumped to the foreground after months spent lurking in the back. It’s a terrifying thought. It’s an exciting thought.
[i was speaking to a friend the other day, by the heavy door with the all-too-easy passcode, about how i was feeling. spoilers: not great, but now isn’t the time. more specifically, i tried to express my chagrin regarding the ubiquity, the indiscriminate nature of melancholy. how, dear reader, is it possible that my favourite thing in the world -- that being making music with my friends -- can engender fear, anxiety, sadness at the same time as it does excitement, adrenaline, joy? i proceeded to ponder it in silence, wondering where the boundaries between the two sides lay, wondering how i could feel both at once, how they coexisted. anyway i lied. this didn’t happen, but on sunday evening i imagined it happening on the smoke break between Loud Song #2 and Louder Song #1. i imagined said friend empathising not like a father figure might -- someone who clearly has their *** together -- but as a similar sad sod; just a little bigger and a little more talented. i hope they don’t read this. sorry i betrayed your trust.]
As “artists” (I use the term lightly. Do not compare me to a Spencer Clark) I think all we’re trying to do is distil emotions into something a stranger can both connect to and move to, but rarely do we so emphatically place multiple feelings in the same conversation to see how they react to each other. We are all primary colours and no secondary. Enter Typhonian Highlife, I guess, who somehow manages to make the eerie uplifting and the uplifting downtrodden.
There’s a section of
Nano-Zootypes… that sounds like a robot dragging its feet lethargically through sewer water. It circles the drain for a bit before being snapped out of rotation by an abrupt double bass warble. It’s self-sabotaging in a way, placing the listener in the cold damp darkness before bringing reality crashing down on their listening experience, as if to say it’s not real, it’s all a joke, smile for the camera. And the balancing act is executed with finesse: it doesn’t ruin the immersion but rather enhances it, melding the real world (that is, the listener’s perspective, context, state of mind) with the one of its own creation and thus emphasising how emotion and logic are often parallel lines. Also explains why I fear the idea of nothing. Your local experimental electronic musician is your new therapist.
[i am dwarfed by the choir and the choir is pushed aside by inhuman voices. like the hierarchy of marine life in a backyard pond. scenes transition unceremoniously, one think cast aside for another, each more alien than the next. when you begin the play so far from the familiar, the sense of isolation intensifies, and what’s left to do but reflect? what’s a few extra miles to a world of distance? and then there’s an inexorable wall of white noise and then there’s the daydreaming and then there’s imagination subsuming coherence… i was meant to make a point about
The World of Shells here. i forget what it was.]
Dear Spencer Clark, where do you even begin? I can’t pinpoint the root of these ideas, can’t predict the pattern or sequence of this music, because there is none. Accost me for not discussing the process more, lambast me for not riffing about the qualities of the music, but I’m sorry, I’m not qualified. From a technical standpoint, this constantly morphing, evasive body of sound intimidates me to no end. It sounds like a myth. It sounds like it couldn’t possibly be crafted by something manmade but rather extracted from some far-off planet and bent into a shape vaguely relating to conventional music. I have no idea what a sampler does.
In retrospect, I’m fairly certain the parenthetical above is an interpretation, a portrait, of the final track,
Oracle of Egret, a fifteen-minute odyssey well worth the time. But reviewing (I use the term lightly. Do not compare me to a proper journalist, or the rest of staff for that matter) is tiring and difficult and I took a break between sittings. This album tries to tell us to stop trying to rationalise with emotional responses, to not place significance on a logical sequence of events. You win, World’s Most Affecting Book of Non-Sequiturs: I refuse to make any edits to this review once it’s released into the wiild.
