Arovane
Tides
[City Centre Offices]
Rating: 8.8
The homeless lady who sits outside the yuppie coffee bar on the corner of my
street assures passers-by that the end is coming. I think she's desperate to
convey her message. Though the United States is saber-rattling with the
People's Republic of China, it seems that everyone has overcome their
millennial tension, and the eve of destruction has turned to a morning of
devil-may-care optimism.
Collectively, we're overjoyed that, without much effort or awareness, we
kicked the Beast's ass. The Beast, as prophesied by some locust-muncher out
in the Negev Desert thousands of years ago, was supposed to arrive last year
and annihilate us before being mightily smote by our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ. I missed this. Living as I do in America's capital, the seat of
iniquity and corruption, I should have had ring-side seats to the most
righteous beatdown of all time. I even missed witnessing the Rapture, the
faithful's assumption to the right hand of God that was suppose to occur
just before Satan's saurian shredded all of creation.
The homeless lady implores those who walk by to believe. "You've not gotten
away with your godless existence," she seems to be saying, as she sits
surrounded by two shopping carts and two decades' worth of daily newspapers.
She never gets ranty or violent, and by and large, is on the presentable side
of destitution. This way, one doesn't feel sullied when approaching her
personal space to drop a dollar into her plastic cup. She always tells you
you're blessed by Our Redeemer and wishes you a beautiful day. Nonetheless,
she tirelessly reminds everyone that the end is coming.
She's right, of course. At some future point, by virtue of the inescapable
effects of entropy, the universe will collapse in on itself and unimaginable
havoc will ensue. But that's about a trillion years into the future, so I'm
not going to let that distant apocalypse disturb me too much. However, the
homeless lady's admonitions do remind me that, though I won't likely be around
to fall victim to the utter destruction of time and space-- the reducing of
everything to an infinitely small and massive energy blip-- some things around
me now are evanescent, transitory, limited.
These evanescent, transitory, limited things are the stuff of poetry. They're
the familiar beauty of Dante's Beatrice, the redeeming orchestral
tuttis in the third movement of Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony, the
consummate swish of Ted Nugent's cat tail. To this incomplete list, we must
now add several moments from Arovane's Tides.
After his Pole-ish remix of Various Artists' "No. 8" and his Autechre-indebted
debut, Atol Scrap, I was ready for Uwe Zahn (aka Arovane) to express
himself rather than pay homage to his IDM heroes. And instead of drawing
inspiration from the insides of his iMac or the boom-bip sounds of yesterday's
tomorrow, Zahn dug the sea. Yup, a trip to the French coast fired Zahn up to
combine ambient undulations of a vaguely Vini Reilly guitar with ebbing and
flowing beats. After the harpsichordian trills of "Theme," the title track
focuses on the subject of Zahn's meticulous study. And study he has.
These brief tracks need no remixing or extending for club action; they're far
from being the background to bong hits. Their encapsulation of the hypnotic
motion of water and the uniqueness of each wave marks Arovane out as
unquestionably in the same small class of self-assured and talented musicians
as Boards of Canada and Jake Mandell.
"Tomorrow Morning" is a windchime melody surrounded by cicada strings and the
almost imperceptible hum of moth wings. It gives way to the Bill Frisell-like
impressionist guitar lines of "Seaside." "The Storm" begins as another
harpsichord etude before torrential rain pours down in the form of
pounding-as-John Bonham beats. Zahn returns to tranquility with "Deauville,"
enhanced by oddly graceful squarks of seagulls gliding overhead.
Zahn has resisted the temptation to describe in glitch minimalism the
hydrodymanics of solar and lunar influences on our oceans. And surprisingly,
Tides is not an amateur attempt at eco-journalism (Zahn's seashore
isn't littered with garbage and melanoma-hungry humans)-- it's an artist's
impression of an earthly paradise.
The prominence Zahn gives to the harpsichord through this album exemplifies
the deliberate, contemplative unrealism he wishes to communicate; he's taking
a sound commonly associated with Baroque parlors and betwixt-minuet trysts,
and attempting to reprogram our associations. And while I can't say that I've
been wholly won over by this aspect of Tides, I have been-- and continue
to be-- astounded by the rare reflective grace of the music. So let the end
come. Satan's stormtrooper will destroy me, never less than charmed by the
ceaseless undulation of Tides. I can conceive of far worse ways to
go.
-Paul Cooper