Picture unqualified people, depicted as top-notch artists by partisan press and stoned fans as they randomly hit supposed sculptures, perhaps derived from leftover household appliances. Well, the wannabes are now in trouble. Chas Smith is back, it’s time for them to shut up. And learn.
Here’s an awe-inspiring triplet of echoing soundscapes that still don’t last long enough to make up for the hours of meaningless music (and words) squandered by acoustic investigators in their age of gullibility. We have all been there as youngsters, too open to whatever “new” appeared. Without proper grounding, it can happen to put some trust in dummies deprived of both emotional and rational skills, whose creative valence is as deep as the esoteric puddles they refer to in pretended travels through the universes. Then again, that’s what happens to countless hopeless persons in everyday life, most of them not even having sounds inside to somehow improve.
Whenever Smith decides to set foot in his studio, the experimentation he carries out is made up of months of trial and error. Imagine the hope of a researcher devising a mechanism that presumably will produce a certain kind of sound, but does not get the desired result. Think about the patience it takes to treasure the experience and start over, after hypothesizing another “right way” from that mistake. All this and much more is reflected in these superb pieces, whose reverberating core belongs to instruments entirely conceived and manufactured by the composer, who baptizes them with great names. As a mere sample of the man’s aesthetics, at one point in “The End Of Cognizance” bowed and struck metals reveal every possible nuance, from chimerical female voices to the intrinsic pulse of the very existence. Harry Bertoia – a declared influence on Smith’s work – is surely nodding in approval, somewhere.
Three swathes the being with an incalculable amount of harmonic constituents that blend intelligently, evoking dimensional and temporal shifting amidst fluid substances of unknown origin. To summarize the unplanned contemplation with a ridiculously metaphysical description, we felt like a melting component of the death knell that will virtually assist our adaptation to the next state of our matter. In that condition one communicates by resonance, each sound transmitting explicit messages and remaining in suspension until the assimilation of information is complete. Across the pitiful conditions in which we currently live, those who know the codes are already in contact.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 