Michael Stearns
Encounter

Films like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" have shown us contact with aliens, and albums like "Encounter" by Michael Stearns have let us listen to it. Released in 1988, the work is a wordless tale of an experience that goes from Earth (the sound of crickets, or the crackling of fire in the opening track) to space (with some spaceship occasionally landing and taking off), in which each of the ten pieces describes an emotional situation, an impression, a constant sense of anticipation and wonder.

The music is placid, contemplative, yet internally articulated within each track, so they don't sound monotonous or repetitive. Michael Stearns takes you by the hand and accompanies you along this journey ("A Journey in the Key of Space" is the album's subtitle) entirely instrumental and made of soft electronic sounds.

The narrative dimension seems a constant thought in this work by Stearns (born in Tucson, Arizona in 1948), so much so that each track is equipped with a title and subtitle: reading them in sequence, you get a verbal description of the work and some of these pairs are truly intriguing (In marcia. Carovana spaziale / Passaggio di dimensione. Attraverso la soglia / Processione. Cerimonia sacra, just to name three examples).

This is to say it is program music: a mode once widely used in classical music, with its most known derivation being the so-called symphonic poem. In non-classical music, it is called a concept album, which "Encounter" is rightfully: an evocative music even if sometimes a bit taxing in the slowness of its progression.

"A very personal yet familiar sonic journey to everyone", said the author about this album. In it and other works by Michael Stearns, enthusiasts of the Californian ambient school (Steve Roach, for instance: the two have made a couple of albums together) and all those who love a genre of music that has the ability to let you imagine distant dimensions will feel at home.