From silence, everything cycles before returning there. No one knows better than David Jackman.
It’s always rather discouraging to read certain reviews of this gentleman’s work, whose tight-lipped consistency will never be praised enough. There seems to have been no serious attempt whatsoever to comprehend Jackman’s production from the last 15 years or so. For an example concerning this very moment, Silence In That Time was described somewhere as a mere continuation of the previous Herbstsonne on the exclusive basis of a “similarity” in the utilized sounds. Standardized critics have not noticed, or accepted perhaps, the precise stylistic choice that led Jackman to using the same recorded sources in varying compositions, starting with Organum’s trilogy Amen/Sanctus/Omega and continuing through albums such as Raven.
There is much more behind all this, summed up in a single “conclusion”: the sonic result represents exactly what the man has to say. There are no mystical, analytical or overly technical explanations. If anything, Jackman tries to acoustically render what influenced him in visual terms, as stated in by now dated interviews. Repetition and its variables are a form of art directly (and involuntarily) connected with a life’s patterns; in this particular case, most people appear to conveniently forget.
The constituents may be interchangeable from a record to another, but the expert ear captures different nuances. In this 42-minute piece, bracketed by soundless segments and implicitly divided into three sections, the primary characteristic is a greater emphasis on the low-frequency resonance. The turbulence of the subsonic matter keeps echoing for long, revealing a whole range of inner movements and subterranean throbs in mind-affecting combinations. Along these currents the momentous piano, the Hammond’s droning strokes, the assuaging tampura, the faraway bell tower, the cawing ravens keep pointing to that one path, unfortunately still disregarded by too many.
Silence. An impossible-to-understand concept for those who are frightened by solitude.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 