Aetheric Architecture & Illusions
From the opening vocal-like phrases to the last crash of the waves, Illusive is a voyage of granular organic electronic instrumental music. Illusive has seven tracks and provides an engaging flow, the sonic events constantly change and smoothly lead into new situations and discoveries. There are delicate details, vast quiet spaces and sweeping motion which keeps the listener pleasantly guessing and glowing. The sounds are not natural, with a few exceptions: some birds, some water, and there are probably some more mysterious field recordings hidden in the mix, which any great chef understandably celebrates without revealing all of his kitchen secrets. The most prominent ingredients are calm and curious. By the end of this album, the listener is left with a feeling of quiet uplift, knowing the world renews and a sense of hope will prevail at days’ end.
The composer, Kelly David, shares some of his motivations, “This is definitely my pandemic album. I started on the album in March of 2020 and finished a year later. My excursions into my studio became an escape from the uncertainty, fear and madness of the outside world over the last year...this was a translation of the peace I was seeking within myself.”
As the project took form, “I began with some predetermined compositional structure for each piece. Mostly, it was a set of harmonic materials, namely a reliance on the subset modes of the major scales. Sometimes I modulated between different harmonic modes in the same piece. The modes often impact the emotional quality of a track as some modes are inherently sad or create a feeling of longing.
“In writing Illusive, I relied on a more complex harmonic structure than my previous album. I focused on the harmonic modes, both major and minor, to form the unifying harmonic structure. In several pieces, I wove several different modes into the same track. Also I deliberately created more space between sections, allowing silence to seep in throughout the album. What is consistent throughout my music is the use of my field recordings, the recorded natural environments range from deep woods recorded at midnight to a wave-pounding subtropical sea shore.
“Once I reached the point in recording the album where I recognized the quiet delicacy in the music, images of impressionist visual art came to mind: distinct and varied colors, often with the softness of water colors and then deeper, darker waters that flowed deep inside the music.”
Although illusions distort our perception of reality, they are generally shared by most people, thus resulting in fine art. What you will encounter are castles in the air, an array of illusions of hearing, exploring mysterious technologies that allow the composer to construct new worlds inside your headphones. This music invites us to consider the experience of discovering phantom objects and the realization that this entire gigantic gallery is artificial, designed for celebrating curiosity, and showing how to find inspiration for many of our possible futures.
Natural laws are different in this new place. The wilderness ahead is nothing like what we know on our home planet. The night fogs here are chromatically rich and endowed with vast electronic string and choral apparitions. The surroundings are vast and there is a watchman in the haunted tower, "Sentinel" (9:20) opens the voyage, exploring crafted hallucinations and invented soundscapes never before attempted. Later there is drumming coming from the distance, with melodic swirling fragments.
There is a tiny bit of a street in Oahu, where on a vacation in a house there, Kelly David recorded some of the themes that appear in "Palione" (9:54). Whilst presiding in the soft and brilliant foliage of this strange world, around a salt water pool, his peaceful and serene themes flow along from there past here. A bubbling form of electronic percussion emerges briefly, followed by beams of celestial color and reverberation, sometimes I can hear gulls in the distance, avian phantasms.
Distance is a relational measurement of how far apart objects or points are. Our path can be seen from great reaches, providing a deceptive appearance or impression of infinity. There are cycles of activity that rise and fall, there are occasional breezes and passing birds that are unlike anything that I have ever heard before, and then through the furthest trees I can hear the open sea, suggesting blue waters shimmering beneath the brazen sun. "Distance" (7:33) is an illusion of space, which changes as perspective adjusts. As I near the confines of the imaginary forest I see before me, between the grove and the open sea, a broad expanse of meadow land. As I am about to emerge from the shadows of the strange trees, a sight meets my eyes and ignites new wonderment for the beauties in this fantastic expanding landscape.
All of these elements are woven throughout these sonic stories. This track starts off with a sense of building energy just below the surface. Delicate reverberations and sparkling sprites cavort beneath fog horns that call darkly out to the vast quiet ocean. These sound like jungle birds hidden in the magical foliage. Behold the "Garden of the Forgotten" (5:19), as one turns their glance in any direction the garth has the appearance at a little distance of a vast, high-ceiled chamber. Hear the choirs of ignis fatuus, the will-o'-the-wisp, performing various lilting calls in the arboreal canopies. Tension builds and eventually releases as the passing elements reflect strangely changing colors.
As far aloft as I can see the stems and branches and twigs are smooth and highly polished and filled with brilliant, nameless birds. I call them birds since they are winged, but mortal ears have never rested upon such odd, unearthly shapes. "Top of the Trees" (8:03) is where the phantom blooms cluster thickly upon these strange branches and may not be described in any earthly tongue. Do these exotic steamy tropics have a variety of snowflakes? Something sparkly is decorating the breezes above.
The definition of ether is the sky, used especially when describing electronic signals that travel through the air. "Into The Ether" (12:25) brings a gentle taste of ether, or æther, the mysterious substance once thought to suffuse the universe. This track’s title might suggest something disappearing into nothing, like a specter of pure fantasy. The motion of the music is like a heat mirage, swaying and shimmering in plain sight off in the distance ahead, guarding the facts while lulling the urgencies of the daily hubble bubble. Through the entire duration of this track there is the sense of a grand piano reverberating continuously, sort of glowing on and on without diminishing, guarding your dreamscape and allowing for a more complete escape.
The final track breaks open the box and leaves clues to follow into new territory, again! Further go our ears, whispering reports of alien lands and never before encountered ways of being. Is the music coming up from the ocean depths or floating down from the distant heavens? I hear the surf on the shore, an oceanic heartbeat. I hear the electronic cryptids reeling in the trackless regions of interplanetary space. "Northcoast" (15:52) mixes the rise and fall of oceanic planetary life with the distant horns of the angels. Along the way in one place I hear a harmonica coming from somewhere in the caverns below, inspiring visions of phosphorescent notes from the depths of the earth while looking right up into the night sky over the open waters. Later we discover clouds of electronic cicadas in the oceanic caves.
The music of Illusive is part of an ongoing process, learning to rotate, scale, skew, transfigure or translate a sonic chorus of disparate elements, a guide for cataloging the ideas about distant intelligent life in the universe, inviting adventurers to traverse the trackless void at will, coming and going between the countless planets. I have a love of expansive time, containing wide, open-voiced chords and things that suggest foreign auditory phantoms, using a technology that lies beyond our horizons, perhaps the technology of para-physical forces.
Kelly David has a small but growing handful of unique albums which explore these experiences of constant synthetic metamorphosis, he is pioneering a new form of organic electronic ambient audio arts. His first album with Spotted Peccary Music, Meditation in Green (2019) is a continuation of a musical journey that began with Kelly’s independently released first album, Broken Voyage (2002), mixed and produced by Steve Roach. On his second independent album, Angkor (2006), the sounds came from a first reflection of Asian travels and deep fascination, both academic and experiential, of the ancient Khmer civilization that dominated SE Asia in the 10th century. Steve Roach mastered Angkor, contributing his sonic treatment to the mixes. After that, for a shared album, The Long Night (2014), is a full-on collaboration with Steve where they worked "side by side" in Kelly’s Denver studio and Steve's Arizona studio, creating a deep work meant for the virtual dead of night. Kelly reflects, "Steve Roach opened the door for me and showed me how to walk through it."
Illusive begs for some sort of visual deception, a mirage, a dreamlike image that appears one way at first glance, but upon further reflection, one realizes there is something deeper in there and makes you want to search deeper, to discover what lies within. Kelly continues, "Illusive refers to a quality of what you're seeing or hearing or where the direction you think the music is going may actually be headed somewhere else. Perhaps this relates to the state of the world during the time of this recording: we weren't so sure of many things.” Illusive offers a journey that is satisfying to the listener, revealing a vision of some new territory ahead.
The album is available from Spotted Peccary Records
https://spottedpeccary.com/shop/illusive/
https://spottedpeccary.com/artists/kelly-david/
https://kelly-david.bandcamp.com/album/illusive
Originally published October 15, 2021
#KellyDavid #newage #ambientmusic #SpottedPeccary #instrumental #electronicmusic
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