Balmorhea
Constellations

A single note can say so much: it opens the door to a universe; a chord can say so much: it outlines the space, the dimension within which we want to disappear forever, for that forever which is the duration of our beloved CD.

And so here is "Constellations". Here is a dark room, a dusty floor, a shadowy ceiling. A sofa in the center: shabby, dark blue, beautiful. Windows are not missing: almost entirely lowered, covered by some gray curtain full of tiny holes: the air filtering in, the very little light passing through.

Everything slows down, our senses expand. We savor that darkness, we smell it, we live it with our eyes and our mind. We ourselves become a simple shade of dark: darker: more noir: more intimate: pitch in the pitch.

We set the night in motion.

The Balmorhea start anew from here, from the darkness, from modern-classical. Set aside the balladlike folk fantasizing, bucolic symphonies under the open sky... forget the green, nature. The departure from "All is Wild, all is Silent" is noticeable. First and foremost, the instruments: the piano above all. Guitar, strings, and banjo warmly accompany at first, then emerge in the second track and towards the end of the work (of art).

The first track, "To the Order of the Night", is a wave of darkness: the sound is caressed, subdued. The piano solo is an apology of Romanticism: essential, nocturnal. Few touches, few notes. It's perfect as a beginning; after all, it's known: eyes need to gradually adjust to darkness.

"Bowsprit": guitar, banjo, percussion, violin, viola, and cello take shape and soul. There they are, the stars that paint the night. However, it's a wild night, much like the sounds of "AIWAIS": a single, small "bridge" to the past. But let's move on. What matters now is their dialogue: not intricate, not cerebral, but dense and intertwined. First the guitar, essential and timid in its chords; shortly after follows the violin, then the banjo (more confident and determined), the crescendo of the percussion, and finally the cello and double bass. A climax without any post-rock explosion. Well done.

Now it's time for "Winter Circle", a warm and brief reprise of the first track, still on the piano notes. As if it were a tacit alternation, here "Herons" retraces the melodic trail of the guitar, here in a melancholic monologue. Once again, the rhythm captivates us with its soft, dilating slowness. We have thus reached the fifth track, the eponymous "Constellations", which is also intentionally not incisive. What emerges is the strongly neoclassical character of the melody, truly a distinctive trait of the entire work (of art), perhaps with some exceptions. The association with fellow musicians Rachel's is therefore very clear and easy to understand.

Now one might wonder: where is the gem? Where is the brightest star in this starry sea? "Steerage and the Lamp" answers these and many other questions: enveloping and warm like the naked body of a woman, it tempts us like an anachronistic Eva of the 21st century towards the Eden of our perdition. Beautiful. Damned. Heart-wrenching. And so, overwhelmed by a thousand emotions, we fall into an eternal sleep that definitively consecrates us to the darkness of the room we were in, lying on that dark blue sofa. There it is, our personal hymn to the night.

"On the Weight of Night" is post-rock at the service of slow-core. The echoes of the organ and the drums resonate in our sleepy minds, marking the degrees of how and for how long of our intimate emotion. The Low would be proud...

"Palestrina" is the first light of the sun's rays, the dawn that saves us from remaining forever clinging to the darkness, to the black, to the armrests of that sofa; the alienating reverberations of the cello are the last apple of the serpent, the last temptation to remain isolated in the deepest darkness. But it's all in vain: the silence that follows the end of "Constellations" is more eloquent than any word or note.

At this point, we reopen our eyes. We feel tired, rested, exhausted, reinvigorated, destroyed, reborn. Most importantly, however, we remember a few moments of our dream, a few tiny frames of our subconscious: we are lying on grass, sideways... we feel the cold wind between our fingers... we hear the cries of a distant owl... we smell the scent of the grass beneath us... we taste the intense flavor of the black of the night... then, turning our head, looking up, we finally notice: a starry painting of rare beauty.