We are surrounded by complexity. Everything from this huge spinning ball flying through space we call home, to the countless chemical, physical and biological ingenuities cycling in endless permutations all around us right now. The technology we have embedded into our lives, and the beautiful, if chaotic designs and mechanisms within our own minds and bodies.
Like all these things, we all have an ability to be aware and benefit without truly understanding much of these marvels. We simply need to know that pushing this button or click this part of an interface somehow makes ‘it’ happen.
As far as music making goes, more than simply creating and organising sound, technology has meant that music doesn’t need to be simple. Music can be sculpted from from hard science, maths, strings of code, biofeedback and banks of data, none of which needs to be understood by the listener. Any input can be fed into the system. All that is required is an open mind, a little patience, and who knows, something baffling might just become hugely, if mysteriously engrossing…
Contraluz is a 3 hour adventure that fits this bill perfectly. Via a Serge synthesizer seemingly fed with economic data, marine ecosystems, weather patterns, field recordings, textures and sound objects. Quite how this all happens isn’t entirely clear, nor important.
Émile Zener is musician Gunnar Haslam and Contraluz is his processing of various sources all extrapolated from the vast Mediterranean Sea and the Balkans. Presumably in part due to Haslam being based in Barcelona, a city at least partially defined by its relationship with the sea.
In many ways, the 3 vast parts of this composition hang together like an abstracted flythrough or computational model of the area. Instead of conjuring a landscape, it’s a framework constructed from pulverised droning arcs, endless ribbons and cinematic fragments. There is an expansion of voices in a huge, cavernous space, the squealing of train brakes, station announcements, vapours of wind and water, the distant roars of motorways, the thrum of cities and throb of human activity. A dreamlike blur made from screeds of data collected into layers of sound.
In the wake of longform works by our hero Roland Kayn, and other giants like Jean Claude Eloy’s sonic reconstruction of Toyko – Gaku-No-Michi, Contraluz feels remarkably concise. 3 hours feels like a considerably lean window to let this work wash over you and lose you in whatever else might be happening. Several times, we have lost track in the infinite folds of music, only to resurface as sounds merge and sit amongst other sounds present in our little house amongst the rain and trees in Scotland.
Quite what Contraluz conveys is hard to fully understand. Clearly lots of components have some sort of logic and structural under-wiring that’s not necessarily vital in enjoying skimming along its odd sonic surface. But there is something magnetic about this music that’s meant chunks of our weeks have been filled by its drifting beauty. It’s only when it you eventually move to play something else, after the wild bristling splendour of its final moments, that you realise how much the weirdness, has became home.
With traces a of cybernetics, musique concrete, and huge passages of light and shade, Contraluz continues to draw us into an indefinable but undeniably rich abstracted space. No sense, in every sense, and perfect sense…
Contraluz is out now on Critique of Everyday Life, available as a 3CD set and digitally
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