Mute
Review by Warren Mayocchi
Imagine if you will, an spacious expanse of musical sound. There is no beat, and there is no melody either. The sounds float around you, cascading through the air somewhat alike a waterfall in zero gravity. As you are gently rocked about by the ethereal sounds an almost religious chanting joins the soundscape and suffuses your senses with a strangely alienating cloud of words. Such is the experience of listening along with KARYYN as she tells of bleeding hearts, loss, and being left for life by the ones who die. In general the album is as I attempted to describe in the above, however there are always exceptions, melody is present in many tracks, “Yajna” and “Segment & The Line” have a pervasive ticking beat. The music and voice are electronic and heavily processed, tending too much of the time to rely on the expressions of cinematic sounds. “The Quanta Series” is a collection of singles which have been released since 2011 – altogether they make a debut album for KARYYN. Due to this format there may be many compositions of which the fans will already be aware, and there is an existing presence for them. The music videos tend toward the personal, as they include home video of what one would expect to be the people for whom KARYYN sings. These stark video moments are in contrast to the a blurry picture of mourning presented through the music. So blurry is the emotion in the music you may need to search for it in other formats, perhaps reading through the lyrics, or watching the videos. In them you will find deeper messages, for example, the video for “Purgantory” begins with a statement “The world is in turmoil because we are so concerned with defining borders…“. Warning, the video also includes a couple of scenes with dead animals – probably sacrificed – bleeding over ground, and family members anointing each other with the blood. Staying with the blurry sounds in the songs may be deep enough for most listeners.
Rating – 78/100
Tracklist:
- Ever
- Yajna
- Purgatory
- Binary
- Ambets Gorav
- Un C2 See
- Mirror Me
- Cytokinesis
- Aleppo
- Today I Read You
- Segment The Line
Line Up:
- Karyyn – vocals, all instruments
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