|
While others grasp for words to express how they feel, Jason Sloan accesses an exploratory musical ethos in seeking essential truths. His sprawling sonic celebration Haven (49'49") offers four tracks (one commissioned by STAR'S END) which bring together the artist's life and his work - suggesting a synergy between the two. Sloan's secret pleasure may be of the Berlin-School variety. Haven's clean lined minimalism serves a potent atmosphere of mechanized machine mystery and dreaming, breathing idyll - filling the mind in four dimensions. With a powerful intellectual undercurrent coursing beneath each realization, Haven urgently pushes into darkness. Slow melodies of crafted consonance offer vague narrative, but only its receiver knows whatever drama this work may tell. As a pulsing echoing energy occupies the center of our attention, breathing chords extend and recede, and poetically deepen our mental journey. While a steadily turning sequencer pulse drives a linear flow, Sloan's power of imagination takes us on unexpected excursions. From primitive utterances lost in the night, and passages of sound horde stillness, to cycling, circling tone patterns steadily moving outward - he implies formal and spatial boundlessness... resulting in an endless, formless thought zone. This music is intended to be rendered by a potentially infinite number of listeners - and imagines the audience as viable collaborators in the artistic process. We find this particular Haven to be for people organized around an idea... that music is a landscape of innovation and wonder - functioning in our lives like nothing else.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 22 September 2016 |
