The Third Eye Foundation
Wake The Dead

Matt Elliott fortunately has never taken long breaks and now boasts a substantial and important discography. The real novelty in this specific case is the fact that his new album, released last February 9th on Ici, d'ailleurs and titled "Wake The Dead," revives his first historic project: The Third Eye Foundation. It is a musical project more focused on the use of electronic instruments and synthetic atmospheres compared to the albums we are used to, and it has been somewhat set aside for the last twenty years (if we exclude the release of "The Dark" in 2010), but now it is unexpectedly relaunched with this record that right from the title immediately presents its concept and its contents.

In some way, "Wake The Dead" marks not so much a shift in sounds but rather a purely conceptual turning point: The Third Eye Foundation, since as far back as 1996, has always been presented as a project based on a certain critical vision of the world around us. A vision that now, after years, according to Matt Elliott, can only be somehow distorted by the contemporary social and political situation and therefore now wants to somehow consider itself fixed and immobile in time and in a transcendental manner seek in an ideal journey into the realm of the dead and their awakening a sort of spiritual regeneration of mankind that opposes this terrible sense of inevitability. The sounds of the album, entirely played by Matt Elliott except for the collaboration of David Chalmin, drummer Raphael Séguinier, and cellist Gaspar Claus, are true synthetic rituals where the ghosts of the past are invoked in a kind of didactic Dantesque allegory filled with suggestions and the alternation of session drum & bass and dubstep with avant-jazz, deep ambient and trance paranoia nuances.

Apparently, it is difficult to find something reassuring in these bleak sounds where a great songwriter and vocalist like Matt Elliott deliberately renounces the use of the voice to make space for meditations and transcendental experiences that always refer back to the divine (that is, Dante), in this case specifically aiming at a redemption of universal humanity on the ideological level in a journey that starts from the shores of the Acheron but ultimately leads us to ideally see the stars again in the mystical realization of that process of excessus mentis of illumination of our souls.