Brian Eno
Apollo: Atmosphere & Soundtracks

Floating in unencrypted stellar spaces, never touched by earthly human experiences. Crossing thresholds of worlds that lead to elsewhere, passing through barely perceptible space-time slits, where one has a chance to fully assimilate the ecstatic experience of antimatter and push one to go even "further beyond". An impalpable, light sound (?) never completely "listenable" but instead assimilable, to the point of becoming a second skin or an integral part of oneself; the soundtrack of an imaginary journey to other galaxies, at the impossible confines of an immeasurable infinity.

We find ourselves thousands of kilometers from planet Earth, where everything is indistinguishable, where the air becomes inconsistent, where what's lacking is not just gravitational force. The coordinates of "common living" as we understand it on the Earth's surface are missing. What predominates is the concept of "absence", the emptying of the soul, the annulment of the ego as our relation to our very "existence". The music of this journey does NOT belong to us: it belongs to the stars, to the Milky Way, to the celestial mechanisms that regulate the laws of the Universe, not decoded as they are NOT bounded. Listening to this album necessarily implies going beyond pre-established and universally accepted canons of beauty or melody, sound and emotion, feelings and taste, beautiful and ugly. These evaluation parameters are valid "down here", among us humans endowed with the weight of a body, the limitation of an ego, and the struggle of living integrated into a Civilization, whatever nature it may be. Up there it is different.

Beyond the atmosphere, different logics make everything move. First: the lack of time as a succession of moments. Second: the absence of rhythm (born precisely to mark time, give a rule, create symmetries, provide a support for the listener to divide periods into moments, moments into increasingly fractional units) of melody (understood as the succession of chords and harmonies to create beauty or musicality as we know it). Third: the absence of a human voice which however ethereal and angelic, remains too burdensome a load for such an intense experience. Fourth and final element: the absence of weight. The absence of body, substance, matter. Where everything is a "harmonic unity" there is no need for this, because "there" is already beauty, is already harmony, is already awareness and an inclination to what could be called spirituality. Brian Eno, much like in "2001 A Space Odyssey", has taken a 48-minute journey that could be many or perhaps too many, as long as a moment or short as an eternity.

Rare and precious minutes, uselessly classifiable, like trying to decipher the subdued cry of a fetus in the mother's womb, the luminosity of a rainbow or the breath of an enlightened Tibetan monk. Other codes, other parameters, other units of measure, another way of relating to things must be found. Eno perhaps has found it or at least came very close. During this musical exploration journey in the cosmos, he has delivered back to us 12 fragments of stars (6 more aerial like still-suspended fragments and another 6 more melodic, as if the fragments had become meteorites fallen onto the Earth's surface and thus already "filtered" and made "melodic" for "us" to listen to), 12 jewels from another dimension, 12 pearls that cannot be missed by those who, through music, seek a connection with a higher entity, whatever name one chooses to give it. After all, even names are just conventions "down here".