|
Listening to Panoramas 3 (59'59") is to enter yet another imagined world by Paul Ellis. The third album in the trilogy offers the opportunity to find newness, otherness, possibility, and an incomparable sense of certainty about what lies out ahead. This grand space for seeking, attractive to the more imaginative and forward thinking among us, reveals itself continually over the course of its two tracks and hour long duration. With all suggestions of scale removed, in its liminal realm of sound and atmosphere Panoramas 3 feels so intimate while hinting at the infinite. Each moment transpires along a foundation of harmony, which supports a searching melody, holding fast beneath trembling expressions of timbre and tone. Attempting to connect directly with the most essential part of the listening mind, Ellis realizes vistas of chill still currents flowing in cosmic cold clarity - soundscapes of beauty, yearning and mystery in equal measure. In order to fully encounter his meditative exercise of fragility we are asked to ignore all obstacles to deep focus, and so meet a mind where sound and music has taken on a representational value for existence. Yet, as drifting and searching as this journey is, we may nevertheless know a unity of arrangement and form and sense the message being conveyed. Moving deeply at the speed of thought, pulled through shadows to light, this work brings us to a better place - a zone of one's own, where we will remember back to the day when we could still dream about tomorrow.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 14 September 2023 |
