Max De Wardener ~ Where I Am Today
This is something
special. There are hints of a beatless Steve Reich, hints of medieval music.
There’s a willingness to mix different elements and soundworlds, but
to do so sensitively. In fact sensitivity is a key note of Where I Am Today.
There are only 9 songs and they last only a total of 33 minutes, but the brevity
of the album contributes to the impression of something small, but wonderfully
formed.
Luster is like entering a scented shell garden and sitting patiently while the wind blows gently around your head. Automata speeds and threatens to go haywire. Until My Blood Is Pure introduces pipe organs that parp away like forerunners of a digitised future. Thyrsis’s wind chimes are worried by dsp nightmares, perhaps they see a new, unwelcome future. Wires might be drum’n’bass imagined by the engineer charged with the responsibility of ensuring that the town clock and its clockwork figures still work after hundreds of years. Or perhaps it’s the engineer’s son who has borrowed his mother’s keys, stolen into the clocktower in the dead of night and mischeviously re-engineered the machinery according to his latest breakbeat composition. What will the expression be on the townspeople’s faces in the morning?
Luster is like entering a scented shell garden and sitting patiently while the wind blows gently around your head. Automata speeds and threatens to go haywire. Until My Blood Is Pure introduces pipe organs that parp away like forerunners of a digitised future. Thyrsis’s wind chimes are worried by dsp nightmares, perhaps they see a new, unwelcome future. Wires might be drum’n’bass imagined by the engineer charged with the responsibility of ensuring that the town clock and its clockwork figures still work after hundreds of years. Or perhaps it’s the engineer’s son who has borrowed his mother’s keys, stolen into the clocktower in the dead of night and mischeviously re-engineered the machinery according to his latest breakbeat composition. What will the expression be on the townspeople’s faces in the morning?
Colin Buttimer
August 2004