- → Review on I Love Fantasy by Sound Projector
Review on I Love Fantasy
By Sound Projector
Alejandra & Aeron are pretty much the 'executive producers' of this, as they stress the 'folk and legend' aspects of the music on this curious and wonderful release. 'A Society without fantasy is inert' is their bold claim - we need imagination, we need religion, we need utopian images to affect change. All of this music exists 'somewhere between a laser light show and a shooting star', that is to say it's a contemplation of the power of man's artifice, and the frightening power of nature.
Here's four short pieces which live up to that claim. Aerospace Soundwise from Chicago emanate a chilling soft, white drone that is like spending an hour on top of a mountain, lost in a blizzard, buried in a snowdrift. Besides evoking the indifferent brutality and cruelty of nature, they remain resolutely electronic - as the amplifier hum will remind you. Evol from Barcelona use their track to relate a shocking tale of 'Animal Justice', in both text and sound, with their samples of dogs barking, growling and whimpering, intercut with violent electronic noises. The samples grow more menacing as the complexity of the electronic processing increases, suggesting a forced change, animals mutating into cyber-monsters. This snarling episode is a vast improvement on their picayune MEGO release, I trow.
From Hamburg, we have Felix Kubin with Klangkrieg and Reznieck. They have another curious narrative, involving the Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The story is about deception, suggesting that the fear of unknown outer space was too much for the Russian scientists, who contrived events to change it into a human story of heroism. But the terrors of outer-space come very much to the fore in this unsettling track - even though it has an endearing (and appropriate) clunky, sci-fi feeling. The album closes with a track from Onkyo musician and sampler heroine Sachiko M. Eschewing a narrative or text, her only printed statement is a short row of numbers. Perhaps this is a vision of digital computer hell, belied by the near-religious purity of her sine-wave drones. The record thus closes in prayer. Contemplate the mathematical geometric perfection of a snowflake (see front cover) as you listen.
Concentrate on this music. All four of these intense miniatures should help to loosen the shackles that tie you to the banal trivialities of life, and aid the creative mind to foster new fantasies, new ideas about possibilities for the future. If so, then I Love Fantasy will have been a resounding success. 'Survive awfully boring by drifting away'.
Ed Pinsent