| Artist: Ian Boddy Album: Chiasmata Released: 20 March 2004 |   |
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Ian Boddy goes beyond the panoramic on his live album Chiasmata, a concert recording of his November 2003 performance at the planetarium of Leicester's National Space Centre. The music on Chiasmata was created live beneath a night sky of spinning spheres, comet trails and intense stellar phenomenon, all projections on the dome of the planetarium. At such places, music and visuals combine to provide audiences with some of the most compelling space & music experiences possible. The concert opens with churning clouds of cosmic debris slowly settling into a sonorous expanse of atonal synth modulations and free-form galactic eruptions. These abstract aural expressions are an attempt to put into understandable form, the infinite scale and vastness of the universe. Boddy's personal sonic revelations are excellent (and as valid as any lecture or text attempting to define that which is infinite). Out of this weightlessness rises the track "Ecliptic" (originally from the album Aurora). The piece's fascination rests in its relaxed rather than robotic phrasing. Here Boddy draws on his roots in classic spacemusic while embracing the vernacular of ambient chill. Throughout the concert, Boddy alternately widens and contracts the scope of his work with wonderful transitions and imaginative musical scenarios - drawing us in and then moving on. The soft edges of drifting amorphous forms and figures contrast the rhythmic lattices of electronic blips and bleeps. From stillness and absence of motion to activity and order, his music gently swings back and forth between dynamism and contemplation. According to Boddy, celestial mechanics has a backbeat. The smart grooves and interlocking arpeggiations within his more active and energetic pieces develop incrementally, steadily advancing and expanding, and act as a reminder for us to slip back into our bodies and feel the pulse and beat of the music mix with our own. Astronomy has learned nearly all of what it knows from light. Through sound, and our vivid imaginations, Boddy and his audience endeavor to move out across the dark distances of space - to visit places no human has ever been.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 11 March 2004 | |
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