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"Sounds from a Future Past"
I believe that even Ben Chasny himself (the sole figure behind the SOOA moniker) never thought he would reach a decade of career; especially he would never have expected an almost unanimous acclaim from critics and listeners for his music. Yet, with each new release, one is amazed by the consistently above-average quality of his musical vision and his innate syncretic ability to blend together the past, present, and (perhaps) future of the multifaceted folk universe.
An artistic trajectory that starts from rugged territories, between rural folk and disturbed mantric inserts tending towards drone music, with fierce homages to Indian ragas ("Dust & Chimes"), collisions between free jazz and fingerpicking ("School of The Flower"), leading to the intimate electric melodies of the latest "Shelter From The Ash". A journey arduous for many artists but which Ben has undertaken so far with total safety and freedom, gradually setting aside experimentalism in favor of a non-trivial melodic search, as simple on a first listen as it is profoundly evocative in the long term.
"Luminous Night" stands as a culmination of both this melodic search and his previous experimental impulses, excelling in both. Not holding back on small experiments outside his compositional frameworks, an indication of an artist never set in his ways, with a mind always open to genre cross-pollinations. The opening "Actaeon's Fall (Against The Hounds)" is as distant as it gets from what Chasny has done so far, with its medieval folk song gait (complete with prominent flute), it could easily leave many of his old fans disappointed.
It's hard, however, to find flaws in the remaining 7 tracks, perhaps because they are very heterogeneous, each in its own way a homage to the many incarnations of the Chasnyan sound. From the Indian and spiritual "Bar Nasha" and "The River Of Heaven", between tablas and ecstatic arpeggios, moving through to the ambient drone of "Cover Your Wounds With The Sky" and the noise openings of "The Ballad Of Charley Harper" and "Enemies Before The Light", the latter being among Chasny's darkest and most claustrophobic compositions.
After listening, preferably at night, to the fragile "Anesthesia" (in which Chasny candidly states among pastoral tones "I'm a vengeful man"), and the poetic and beautiful "Ursa Minor" (among the best homages to the Balearic Pink Floyd of "More"), the night will seem less dark to you and a small light will peek through the trees.
If it's not the album of the year, it's close.
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