Review Summary: Experience not being while being alive
I discovered this album while I was driving along a winter road under a beautiful grey sky. Before this, I had listened to Substrata, Cirque, Shenzou and Autour de la Lune.
Still now, some years later, it makes me "travel" just as the first time I listened to it. The best way I can find to explain the experience of listening to it is an alchemical process. You get transformed, you are no longer yourself, not even human, while listening to this album.
You are going through all the states of matter and conscience (even if to me air is dominant in this album, as water in Substrata or earth on Cirque) and your personality is confronted to the pure essence of the world, as if you were remembering (and feeling) the atmosphere states long before animals or plants existed. You feel temperature changes as a movement and cloud forming as if you were the water drops in the air.
The Magnum Opus experience is leading you out of yourself; your conscience is still aware of your existence and the stupid little concerns of life, but something opened a path to a state of conscience that can be called cosmic and you can feel the earth as a whole.
I love the jazzy taste in the album along with the sweet evolution for each song. Also a word for the transitions: specially between "Warmed by the Drift" and "In Triple Time". I feel it like a door opened to life, as if I was passing through the cloudy conscience of a gas to become a free bird flying above the clouds. Sheerbroke is like the variation of snow brilliance during a clear winter day in the great north as seen from the sky, as a reflect in the wide horizon before something that cannot be called you.
While listening to the album, I can remember what we were before conscience existed. While a highly subjective review, I must confess that what I am explaining is perfectly objective for me, like a dream or the facts of life. This comment found in Youtube explains it in a different way, but I also agree on it: "All of his music seemed like soundtracks to movies I've never seen. I get such pictures images and landscapes and scenes in my mind when I listen to his music. I could almost write an entire movie script based on just listening to one one of his tracks. "
