Product Description
2 sodium lights in sequence / highway, homeward bound
3 the final stroke of midnight / on all hallows’ eve
4 the leaves of autumn, falling / summer’s golden tears
Genres: Electronic, Ambient, darkAmbient
“Lately, Eternity Is has been my blessed escape hatch to a distant present. I keep going back.” -Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing
On his seventh Projekt Records release, Australian ambient composer theAdelaidean finds inspiration in simplicity, contrasting purposeful harmonic progressions with melodic lines that thread between calm joy and sustained melancholy. Eternity Is seeks universal truths in both music and thought, evoking the intimate and the infinite through electronic textures that echo a wide variety of sources including theAdelaidean’s own award-winning verse.
1 Eternity Is / against all expectations / nothing but itself
2 Eternity Is / sodium lights in sequence / highway, homeward bound
3 Eternity Is / the final stroke of midnight / on all hallows’ eve
4 Eternity Is / the leaves of autumn, falling / summer’s golden tears
With each title forming a haiku when paired with the album’s title, these four tone poems pit the vast against the everyday by creating vocabularies for mysteries that words cannot fully express. Four poems, and four metaphorical seasons, each drawn using different palettes of sound. The spare synthesis of the album opener leaves carefully crafted spaces for acceptance as the wheel of time turns again to winter. Doom-laden bass hits then herald the return of the hot Australia summer, over a resonant backdrop of simmering dissonance. The piercing, ever-unsatisfied yearning of the Southern Spring, via bells, tolls patiently while deeper forces swirl and shift in the background. Eternity Is closes with choral clusters that rise and fall in waves, evoking the rich golds and oranges of Adelaide’s finest season. Hypnotic, haunting, eternal.
Eternity Is is four seasons of intimate infinity. This year in music and meditation can be played in any order. A symphony of polished sound guides the listener to uncertain destinations, where, deeply hidden against an impressionistic wash, one might hear a faint morse code signal spelling out the title of the album: an answering call from the void itself, as all questions reverberate to black.
Thanks to Shane Bevin tardigradesandtentacles.com
Reviews Editor –
From Audion #71
With a new release coinciding with every second Audion, I’m kind of running out of new things to say about the music from theAdelaidean. But, of course, 66 minutes is hardly eternity, and even with music as slow as this, there’s a lot that happens within its four quite different tracks, each of which is given two titles. Unless each track is actually two independent pieces laminated together, I fail to see/hear the relevance though, and none of the tracks move through more than one phase. The opening Against All Expectations / Nothing But Itself is in Steve Roach Quiet Music territory basically, with very minimal instrumentation, just dual layers of string synth tones. Then Sodium Lights In Sequence / Highway, Homeward Bound has a bass line joined by various layers of synth drifts and a vague melody. The Final Stroke Of Midnight / On All Hallows’ Eve has gentle echoed chimes, deep strings and other synth tones alternating throughout gaining a couple of minor peaks.
And finally The Leaves Of Autumn, Falling / Summer’s Golden Tears returns to Steve Roach realms, though more in the vein of his recent drift outings. So, it’s basically yet more of what theAdelaidean has done before, but in four (12 to 24 minute) self-contained works, all involving much more use of compositional form and melodic elements. In this way, Eternity Is turns out to be his most accessible yet. -Alan Freeman
Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
The most recent release, Eternity Is, contains much of the floating, shimmering beauty that will easily engulf a listener in a warm blanket of mystical cosmic drift, its four long tracks creating a 66-minute journey far into the outer reaches. “Against All Expectations / Nothing But Itself” opens the proceedings with a slowly evolving cyclical floating drift that mixes various chordal elements as it proceeds along its near-seventeen minute path in a classic floating ambient fashion. “Sodium Lights in Sequence / Highway, Homeward Bound” evolves slowly with a three note bass sequence guiding it along, with gentle but enriching atmospheric chordal blasts marking the various points along the journey home. “The Final Stroke of Midnight / On All Hallows Eve” moves along gently with some randomly repeating bell-like sounds clocking the passage of time, while elastic sonic structures throughout the spectrum breathe and grow is the surrounding space while the piece proceeds — at times almost sounding like angelic voices in the distance, The closing track is the 24-minute epic “The Leaves of Autumn, Falling / Summer’s Golden Tears,” drifting along with powerful hints of shimmering color and warm beauty all guiding the proceedings into a soft and gentle flow that meanders slowly to the piece’s conclusion. Both of these albums [Solarpunk and Eternity Is], it should be noted, are only available as downloads from Projekt’s bandcamp page. Both are solid entries into TheAdelaidean’s floating ambient canon, and listening to one right after the other will surely send the listener into a better, more peaceful state. -Peter Thelen