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Rating: "Time Flows Along the Edges"
It flows like an invisible atmospheric stream made of vortices and currents, brushing the pavements, smoothing the stones that pave the cobbled streets, softening and polishing the eternal columns of the Temples… filling deserted amphitheaters with silent dialogues.
Where there is water, where there isn’t, where it is sky, earth, sea, where there is sand and desert that gathers the cries of time, where once screaming trees now without leaves gleam with frost resting on the winter branches…
"There is no dawn bright enough, there is no night dark enough, there is no light that can illuminate me, there is no gaze that can hurt me, everything is inside me" (Detonation)
Like every trace deposited by the world that enters us through a perceptual gap like the blink of an eye, it encompasses the world, which we, as its theatrical boundary, enclose and welcome forever. This is also "the story of a psychic phenomenon." We are the Representation and the Environment of it.
Asked years ago about the name, the Psychick Warriors stated that it is a linguistic game, a deliberate conceptual contrast between two antithetical terms, as if to say that war is virtual, just like the simulation of reality, while "Gaia" is a name with infinite meanings: suffice to recall the one attributed by Isaac Asimov in the Foundation Quadrilogy: a living world, where every element, even a wall, a plant organism, a rock has an "infinitesimal consciousness," i.e., participating (in a quasi-Jungian sense) in a (supposed) universal consciousness. A fascinating idea, which must have marked the fertile imagination of Reinier Brekelmans, Joris Hilckmann, and Reinier Van den Broek. The main theme of this Dutch trio's entire Work, developed in two albums, two mega-mixes, and various singles, is indeed Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, the Physics of the Cosmos… in a way, we can speak of Electronic Concept Art with a scientific theme. More strictly, we are faced with Music which, if it were not for the existence of a diaphragm between the "high" and the "low" (in the sense of the verticality that current Culture attributes to such terms), we could easily define as "Classical". As is the symphonic or poly-symphonic experimental music of Eric Satie, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and other Contemporary Composers. The dual meaning of this collection documents through the various EPs and reinterpretations of these compositions the group's career.
If "Ov The Maenad" establishes the typical rhythmic scan, austere and interacting with a changing ambient dimension, almost a "halo" surrounding a tunnel or a mono-railway in linear motion, "Challenge (Kala mix)" instead reveals the less conventional and more unusual side of this trio's Sonic Art: ambient music reinterpreted in the light of their brilliant creativity. The same as Brian Eno's "Music for Airports", more subtly disturbing: in an associative way, it seems to see and hear a leaden and threatening sky, and whirlwinds of wind and leaves leading to a hurricane. The gusts and lightning are images produced through electronic interference. "Exit 23", presented in three versions, is the track that can perhaps be considered the true "hit" of their entire production; it encodes the canons or rather temporarily fixes some coordinates, while "The Valley", an encyclopedic reinterpretation of decades of Pop and Music in all its nuances, collects space pinkfloydian reminiscences like "Interstellar Overdrive" that accompany us to the "Gates of Dawn": psychedelia as an introspective look into abyssal depths, produced by the juxtaposition of infinite, transparent, multidimensional loops. Perhaps, since History is continuity and change, it is no longer even Classical Music, perhaps it is something that goes beyond, which the very technologies it thematically stages allow to realize, losing something on one side and gaining something new on the opposite shore: the ideal landing of these Musics or the insight into new forms of Art it allows.
"With ambient music, a Copernican revolution is realized: if in Rock, or Pop, the song form was placed at the center of the scene, here it is as if the sound melts into the environment, which indeed becomes the main protagonist of that scene".
The compositions from "Ov Biospheres and Sacred Grooves" convey the idea very well: it has been said about a new interactive frontier of Music that "what lies between Traditional Music and Ambient Music is comparable to two different contexts: with traditional musical forms it is as if you make a train journey, with a two-dimensional path; in Interactive and Virtual Electronic music it is as if you are inside an aquarium: every point of observation becomes the absolute center of the world".
It has been said that Symphonic, or Polyphonic Music, whether the pianistic and instrumental experimentalisms of Claude Debussy or the majestic baroque scores of Johann Sebastian Bach, has a central characteristic: the grandeur of the scenarios represented, the cosmic syncretism of the dialogic interaction between orchestral instruments stirs deep, ecstatic, sublimating emotions but "is without memory"; differently, the "song, a mobile and noble container" (Ivano Fossati) is tied to memory, filled with personal content in the measure of its own communicative immediacy.
Why is it so difficult (at times) to listen to this music, why is the effect so disorienting? Why is it at the same time so "difficult" (for the writer, obviously) to listen to Richard Wagner or Beethoven (starting from the same distance that separates these works from the Rock center and closer music)? The writer does not have an answer. However, I can venture an almost blasphemous parallelism, referring to an extremely lucid comment "listening to these musics produced waves of collective ecstasy". In the live dimension, PWOG reached a "other" dimension, it is as if they broke invisible space-time barriers "adding" a sort of "fourth dimension" to space. Ecstasy, sublime, grandeur are terms that sound very similar to what is said about the "sacred symphonies of time".
In the final analysis, the thesis of the writer (even if not shareable, because precisely it is limited to my angle of observation) is that PWOG, extremely influential in the development of techno-trance over the last two decades (and beyond), and of Electronic Music tout-court, from Polygon Window (Richard James) to Biosphere, The Future Sound of London, and infinite others… is simply, the equivalent in the 21st century of what was called Classical Music in previous centuries. For now, the historicization of formal and artistic aspects is lacking. But it will be remembered as such.
The most evocative image is that of the vessel on the ocean: "music from its beginnings to today is like an island, a continent, a vessel on the ocean, floating and recognizable on its surface… with ambient music, and new sounds it's as if the vessel dissolves to disappear into the ocean, becoming part of it, and leaving only soft glows as a simulacrum of its past existence".
I do not know if listening to the remix of "Kraak" by the Coil at the close of this collection will allow a recognition of such concepts, but the fact remains that "History Ovf Psyckick Phenomenon" is document and monument. Of a Music, of the genius and creative Art of its inventors applied to that material and of these refined, changeable, geometric sculptures of air that the flow of time will render more, and forever, sharp and crystalline. Until it disappears, like a mantle of sand from a submerged civilization, leaving it timeless.
PWOG: the vanished frontier.
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