Right, let’s see if I can get the right year this time shall we? I’ve now changed the year in the title of the last one from 2001 to 2011, wish it was that easy to do my Birth Certificate… Anyway, the plan is to get two of these out of the way today – partly because I didn’t do one yesterday due to a spot of cold-based bedriddening, but mostly because this one and the next are linked by personnel, style and neurology.
I find it difficult to write about any artist or musical work unless the subject is playing. Moods and feelings are easier stirred by what’s going on rather than what’s just happened. This is an album where doing so is nigh-on impossible as it doesn’t so much require rapt attention throughout as subtly force it upon you anyway. It’s also an album that exposes the ridiculousness of doing a list such as this as I’m not sure why it affects me so, why it sits here near the top of my favourites of 2011, or indeed why I so often sit listening to it as often and as bewitched as I do. Although I have to admit that the synaesthetic lightshow that tends to accompany it is a bit of a help.
A Winged Victory For The Sullen is a coming-together of the talents of two composers (Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie) notable for their emotional, minimal works. The result is seven tracks of varying lengths and ideas that flow into each other like calm REM dreams in a single night’s sleep, some obviously personal (the Static King mentioned in two of the tracks is the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse), others open to a wealth of interpretation. These may appear to be sparsely-populated compositions, but they are filled with unspecified emotion, as if that definition is needed to be added by the listener.
On the surface of it, there are three layers involved here. Dustin’s unmistakable piano and Adam’s electronic treatments sandwiching a group of strings and wind, each providing their own frequencies and pulses in tune with each other, which is probably why it’s so easy for the brain to send these signals to receptors built to do something else – I’d say “mistakenly”, but I’m not wholly convinced that this extra-sensory bonus where sound is translated as a chromatic response is completely unintentional. And it’s making it very difficult to type anything.
What A Winged Victory For The Sullen does best is that it fills spaces that I never knew I had – it’s only when the sound is absent at the end of a piece (most obviously when the epic A Symphony Pathétique finally draws to a close) that you realise where you are – you’re aware of everything that has gone on, but it’s as if it’s being piped directly into your subconscious, inviting you down with it without accidentally disturbing anything else that may be down there.
Hopefully, his is the first of a series of ventures for these two artists, it’s an incredibly moving and enriching experience that gets better and better with each listen.
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