|
The journey begins quietly - from out of the trembling air directly to our awaiting consciousness. The Origin Reversal (72'29") by Dirk Serries speaks to the listener in a way words cannot. The required willingness to stretch our minds to every dimension that music occupies is essential to the full enjoyment of this release. On this front Serries is way ahead of most. Having traveled through an extensive and impressive diversity of specialized personas and landscapes under the names vidnaObmana, Fear Falls Burning, The Black Fire, Principle of Silence, 3 Seconds of Air and others Serries has at this moment settled upon exploring the beautiful mystery and possibilities in his electric guitar's expressive timbre. The Origin Reversal sessions were the perfect opportunity to re-visit an earlier musical state, now informed by years of creating works outside of it. The gradual pacing, continual contour balancing and concise arrangement of sonic forms imparts all the impressions of self-portraiture. Its stark formal simplicity reduces the planes of the sonorous space into a few distinctive arcing lines of harmonic progression - in a resounding, recurring, returning and retracting ambient order. Each of The Origin Reversal's five parts begins quietly as notes murmur and repeat alongside one another in minimal tension. The familiar pluck of the guitar has been suppressed so these notes and chords come through in pleasant swells, yet somewhere within we may feel a tightening, a verging, a hope of release. Each new tone seems breathed into the air in an expansion of texture. Triads circulate and recycle in pleasant ways, but due to the mild discord Serries introduces into each track the sensation of resolution never quite arrives. There is a biological basis for the concepts of consonance and dissonance as the primitive parts of our brain makes sense of sounds first. Serries knows how much it takes of each to create an interesting piece of music - in an emanation that reveals truths recounted only when the last echo has subsided.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 20 November 2014 |
