It might seem a bit literal or basic, but the way an artist decides to name a piece is hugely important. Think if Roland Kayn or Eliane Radigue simply numbered their pieces? Artists like La Monte Young and Catherine Crister Hennix regularly mix the hard technical facts with the divine. For these artists, and many more we love deeply, whenever music heads somewhere vast, wordless and radically unfamiliar, the way the work is named creates the merest Earth based starting point. This allows you to create some sort of tangible framework.
It’s not necessarily a safety blanket either, titles can re-enforce the brimming oddness of the experience. After all, for committed listeners that are willing to sit through hours of abstraction, eventually our mind will try to create meanings before ultimately yielding in some way to the vastness…
Certainly, here at OBLADADA, works like these most likely end up conjuring galaxies, wormholes, asteroid belts, and ultimately some form of the infinite twinkling blackness. A very real conceptual space, informed by the laser beam vector between hard science, maths, proportion, and a form of enlightenment and imagination. Snap shots of things that dwarf us – things that in reality, make us near irrelevant.
Whilst this might all sound a bit severe; the strange thing is that despite music like this often feeling uncompromisingly brutal, or not representable in 60 second snippets, the culminative effect becomes the opposite. Literally light years from any new age aspirations, it’s a form of very real, and very ecstatic meditation.
This headspace is also a place that the work of Canadian artist James Hamilton takes us to. Recording under the signifier JH, both his work and his label The Keraunograph Organisation take intrepid listeners on staggering flythroughs of his 4-dimensional monoliths.
The previous release in this series APERIOZOAN had a powerful effect here to the extent it ended up, gaining the lower-case accolade of our album of 2022. A dense inky black box, and 5 CDs that offset a particularly vibrant Scottish summer. Seven parts, sliced into exacting durations outlining its underlining geometry into a 333-minute-long mind melter…
It’s fair to say, two years later – COMAOCEAN arrives with a huge degree of anticipation.
The fact the 3 CDs of COMAOCEAN comes in a minimal white sleeve, the label’s default serifed typographic style, with almost no addition information, or visual representation, means the contents are unadorned. A simple means of delivering the sound to whatever place you’ve decided to press play in.
What happens next takes some time to fully digest.
After the pre-flight check of the 3-minute O: CALIBRATION SEQUENCE, the gates of some alien mechanism open.
The 67 minutes of I: SHIVER, SIGNAL is like a literal floodgate opening. A hammer thud knocks open the dam, and a huge roaring wall of sound surges in. Imagine a jet engine, an underground cavern, some huge industrial machinery, the roar of a busy motorway, the hum of a city, a thick atmosphere loaded with pure electricity, all converging and obliterated into millions of atom sized shards. Foreground, background, bass and treble, everything is inverted, flipped, forwards and backwards. A mandala made from esoteric science. The sound of something pulverised into a fundamental form of totality.
Voids fill, gates open, and 10 minutes in, just as this huge presence almost makes the vaguest of sense, something bizarre happens. The whole thing fades out. Slowly twisting into a drone, this fade out isn’t the sound receding, but rather a sense that you’re slowly rising above it. Panning back from the surface, and whilst the horizon quickly stretches out on every direction, the same sonics are everywhere. The sound isn’t just ‘here’, its all-consuming, and frankly staggering as the illusion continues for some 15 earth minutes…
This ebb eventually interpolates into a huge roaring flow, and then in the final 20 minutes, a spectacular nebulous drift. Elements rise in fall in the droning throb of zero gravity.
The second piece II: ARID SEA, SILENCE, whilst a relatively brief 33 minutes, is somehow the least, and most dynamic episode. Starting as an unwavering drone before presumably, the SILENCE section suddenly stepping up in intensity and volume. In the COMAOCEAN it seems, silence, like everything else, is somehow its own equal and opposite.
III: PROXIMATE, DAWN fills the third and final disc. 70 minutes of abrasive calm before a matrix of squalls, ruptures and tears that only ever reveal even more layers. Whilst the sound never seems to uncover anything about its own nature, after the near 3 hours of COMA OCEAN somehow, a unique geodesic bubble is constructed around the listener.
JH details that the sounds here were created by Hammond organ, amplifiers, Serge modular system, shortwave, voices, plate and spring reverbs and analogue treatments. In all this, we can only imagine that all these sources somehow end up fed into some near infinite regenerating, hall of mirrors type processing. A system that takes small things and grows them into barely graspable vastness.
COMAOCEAN, as a title gives the immediate sense that the whole water analogy works as a way to slowly decode much of what is heard. Waves, peaks and troughs, surfaces and submersions quickly fill days-worth of listening, it’s undeniable strangeness quickly leads to something far more alien.
Like its ultra-impressive predecessor APEIROZOAN, COMAOCEAN quickly becomes bizarrely addictive. For us, some magic threshold is crossed with works that spill into unwieldy durations and biting textures. In its midst, the ability to lose sense of any beginning, or end, or to somehow never see the edges between ‘it’, and everything else, makes listening like depicting a realm as big as your imagination allows.
COMAOCEAN, is another huge mystery and despite is undoubtably spiky exterior, it’s a superbly odd, untamed, but highly recommended form of something that points toward beauty.
Deeply amazing stuff. Nothing else out there, takes you here…
COMAOCEAN is out now, purchase the 3CD edition here
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