[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″ _i=”2″ _address=”0.2.2″][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Content Block” _builder_version=”3.27.3″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/autumn-2019-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/paper-square.png” custom_margin=”0px||0px||true|false” custom_padding=”0px||0px||true|false” saved_tabs=”all” fb_built=”1″ _i=”1″ _address=”1″][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_5,3_5,1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″ _i=”0″ _address=”1.0″][et_pb_column type=”1_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″ _i=”0″ _address=”1.0.0″][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”3_5″ _builder_version=”3.26.6″ _i=”1″ _address=”1.0.1″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.27.4″ custom_margin=”||||false|false” _i=”0″ _address=”1.0.1.0″]<\/p>\n
Having lived for a long while as a literary hermit, it had escaped my attention that serious composers had begun to embrace the works of H. P. Lovecraft as inspiration, much the way the fin de si\u00e8cle composers embraced the slippery and shifting poetic landscapes of Maeterlinck.\u00a0 Not until my nephew dragged me into the virtual world of Second Life, and took me to the marvelously realized town of Innsmouth, where I heard the strange m\u00e9lange of 1930s radio, spoken word, and dark and lustrous orchestral music, did I come to understand that the musical landscape had altered in way that the somewhat primitive and backward communities of film, television, and science fiction fandom had ignored completely.<\/p>\n
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More recently, at Sunday tea, Lezlie Kinyon, editor of Coreopsis Journal, asked if anyone knew any music reviewers.\u00a0 My wife, Diana L. Paxson, pointed out that I had been a pretty busy theater and music critic for several newspapers in the 1970s, and thus I was introduced to the music of Tim Rayborn, who I am sure I must know as a person but was not aware of as a composer.<\/p>\n
Working under his nom de musique of Eidolorous, the first collection of pieces to come to my ear is Fragments of Thanatos<\/i>, a set of seven compositions inspired mainly by H. P. Lovecraft, but also paying tribute to Frank Belknap Long and Ambrose Bierce.\u00a0 The music is classified as dark ambient<\/i>, and it certainly qualifies as that, but I think it is somewhat more.<\/p>\n
Most ambient music seeks to avoid the thesis and arsis structure to which the latter day human consciousness has been trained.\u00a0 These pieces, though not programmatic, do move though time in a linear fashion. One of the definitions of music that has been used is \u2018the aural structuring of time,\u2019 and ambient music in general defies that particular definition: while one walks away unfulfilled if one does not hear the last movement of a Beethoven symphony, the goal of most ambient music is to leave you with no feeling of loss if your walk into and out of the elevator at any point in the composition.\u00a0 I do believe that Eidolorous can be taken that way, but more importantly, I think the music can be taken also as segments of time, structured time, in the same way that any sonata can be perceived.<\/p>\n
It is important here to understand something about H. P. Lovecraft as inspiration.<\/p>\n
While Lovecraft was a master of linear plotting, his strongest power was the evocation of mood.\u00a0 One does not leave a Lovecraft story with a sense of clear action from point A to point B, but rather with a feeling of what it was like getting from point A to point B.\u00a0 Mood and atmosphere overwhelm the reader and the plot alike.<\/p>\n
That, I think, is what Eidolorous is attempting with this music.\u00a0 A vaporous sense of movement carries us through each piece and we are surrounded by echoes and touchstones of the story or poem, but the overall experience is one of ineffable beauty and horror.<\/p>\n
While \u201cUpon a Moonlit Road\u201d (the Bierce entry) is fashioned from pitifully human fragments, like a desperate attempt to restore normality to a grim and pervasive reality, there is nothing much human or humane in the alien intrusion of \u201cWhispers in the Dark.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cAt the Shores of Madness\u201d begins with a festival (perhaps a bit too bright for the decadent dwellers of Innsmouth) but then descends into a muffled aquatic sound world, only to be transformed again as we approach the desired true home of the Old Ones.<\/p>\n
In \u201cA City with No Name\u201d we hear dream-like drifts of melodies that might, after a thousand years, transform in Arabic music.\u00a0 As al Hazrad stares at the ruins of the once great city the forces that destroyed it emerge to overwhelm his sanity, and finally to leave the city once again alone and forgotten in the sands.<\/p>\n
Eidolorous manages a skillful blend of sound throughout.\u00a0 He has a definite voice, and you won\u2019t mistake him for Mimaroglu, but you will catch the references to Schubert and Birger-Bloomdahl.\u00a0 He blends his electronic sounds and his musique concete<\/i> with his traditional orchestra in a way that keeps you listening attentively.<\/p>\n
Of course, not much of this will be important if you are engrossed in a game of \u201cCall of Cthulhu,\u201d but that is one of the wonderful things about music.\u00a0 It serves a multitude of purposes. Telemann is mostly ambient, Beethoven is mostly attentive, and Mozart can be both.<\/p>\n
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Eidolorous manages a skillful blend of sound throughout. He has a definite voice, and you won\u2019t mistake him for Mimaroglu, but you will catch the references to Schubert and Birger-Bloomdahl. He blends his electronic sounds and his musique concete with his traditional orchestra in a way that keeps you listening attentively.<\/p>\n
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The second collection to be reviewed is called Telesterion<\/i>.<\/p>\n
While Fragments of Thanatos<\/i> was released in 2014, Telesterion<\/i> is from 2019, and there is a difference not only of subject matter but a world of subjective difference as well.<\/p>\n
To begin with, let\u2019s get the title out of the way.<\/p>\n
In more than a thousand years nobody ever divulged what happened in the Telesterion.\u00a0 The only people who purported to tell what happened were people who never experienced the initiation.\u00a0 The very best reports are therefore at least second hand, and I suspect not very good. That nobody ever talked should tell us that whatever did happen there must have been pretty overpowering.\u00a0 Think of it: in more than a thousand years, it was important enough that nobody spilled the beans!<\/p>\n
I have been to the ruins of the Telesterion, and the complex leading up to them, and I can assure you there is no way anybody could even guess: though there are a lot of guesses, to be sure.<\/p>\n
When one reads the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, one gets the impression of various events widely spaced.\u00a0 But when one gets there, the little bridge mentioned in the narrative is actually right before you get to the Telesterion.\u00a0 The \u2018rude jests\u2019 would have been just before you entered into the Holy of Holies. From a light-hearted moment at a little bridge over a little creek, one would have gone directly into the immensity of the place of initiation:\u00a0 a kind of theater around a small central structure. Thousands of people crowding in for\u2026 What?<\/p>\n
There is no roof over the place today, only ranks of step-like seating of stone, much the color of Pentalic marble, like the Parthenon in Athens.\u00a0 The hot sun burns down where possibly in Ancient Times there was sealed-in darkness, and in the summer the song of cicadas makes the air buzz. The scent of oleander, the bitter laurel of the Ancients, sweetens the air.<\/p>\n
Up the hill is a cliff with a \u2018cave.\u2019\u00a0 Actually, just a depression in the side of the cliff, not much of a cave at all.\u00a0 Below is the temple of Pluton and Athena, with a huge brick-lined pit for Chthonic offerings.<\/p>\n
The Roman additions to the site are mainly restorations and attempts to connect personality cults to the Mysteries.<\/p>\n
The physical evidence is overwhelming, but it tells us nothing.<\/p>\n
Therefore, it\u2019s anybody\u2019s guess what went on.<\/p>\n
The music which Eidolorous has composed must therefore be taken as a very personal expression of feeling: and that is what Eidolorous does extremely well.<\/p>\n
The first piece of this set, Stimuli<\/i>, is my very favorite of all the pieces to which I have listened today.\u00a0 There is a feeling of excitement, of anticipation, of anxiety, that speaks well of people rushing toward an experience to which they are committed, about which they expect great reward, but about which they are also fearful.\u00a0 There are Greek dance rhythms exploding into the soundscape, but they are heightened, made frenetic, as if you are dancing toward ecstasy but feeling that maybe you are going too far, maybe just not going to make it. This is a very exciting piece of music!<\/p>\n
The second piece, Kathodos, again uses dance rhythms, but they are almost insanely redoubled in their ecstatic frenzy.\u00a0 This is a descent, a place where there is no turning back. Think of being at a rave where you suddenly realize you don\u2019t know where you are, that you don\u2019t know the way out.\u00a0 Is this really where you wanted to be? Have you been carried off? Do you have any idea what is going on? –No, you don\u2019t!<\/p>\n
In Nadir<\/i> the darkness comes on full.\u00a0 It is strangely comforting, like the feeling that you have lost all control and you don\u2019t have to make any more choices, it is all taken care of, it is all over.<\/p>\n
Exspes<\/i> may or may not be the resolution.\u00a0 This is my second favorite piece of all.\u00a0 It carries with it a feeling of majesty, a feeling of the presence of divine forces beyond any control.\u00a0 But now we are a part of it, and whether that is light appearing or whether we are now enfolded in a new reality, it is not ours to understand, it is only a new state which we can seek to grasp.<\/p>\n
I may very well be reading a lot into this that the composer did not intend, but then, as I said up there at the top, Eidolorous does subjective emotion extremely well.\u00a0 What I got out of it may not be what you get out of it. \u2013It is a frequent experience of writers to hear from readers what was meant<\/i> in a story, and it is often a complete surprise to the writer.\u00a0 It is a not-infrequent experience for a writer to be berated by a scholar or critic for not meekly submitting to the analysis of said critic or scholar, who clearly knows much better what the writer was attempting than does the writer.\u00a0 It is from that kind of experience that I make my protestations that that what I got out of the music may not be what you get out of the music, or for that matter, what the composer intended to put into it.<\/p>\n
I recently had reason to listen to Roger Norrington\u2019s original recordings of the Beethoven nine symphonies played on original instruments with the original tempi, as Beethoven marked them.\u00a0 What amazed me was the emergence of Beethoven\u2019s sense of humor. We all know that the first symphony opens with a joke, but what got to me was how that ebullient sense of fun suffused not only the first, but the second, and even the third.\u00a0 A couple of centuries of performance and tradition have coated Beethoven with a gloomy shadow that, perhaps, the composer did not intend to be there at all. So, when I make all those observations above, it may be that I am doing Eidolorous as great a disservice as Toscanini did to Verdi.<\/p>\n
But it is my hope that this review will get you to listen to the music itself, have your own emotional response, and, maybe most importantly, provide some support for this excellent composer.<\/p>\n
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I have been to the ruins of the Telesterion, and the complex leading up to them, and I can assure you there is no way anybody could even guess: though there are a lot of guesses, to be sure.<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.27.3″ background_image=”https:\/\/societyforritualarts.com\/coreopsis\/autumn-2019-issue\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/paper-square.png” custom_padding=”0px|||||” global_module=”215″ saved_tabs=”all” fb_built=”1″ _i=”2″ _address=”2″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.27.3″ _i=”0″ _address=”3.0″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.26.7″ _i=”0″ _address=”3.0.0″][et_pb_divider divider_weight=”3px” _builder_version=”3.27.3″ width=”60%” module_alignment=”center” height=”5px” _i=”0″ _address=”3.0.0.0″][\/et_pb_divider][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row column_structure=”1_4,1_2,1_4″ _builder_version=”3.27.2″ _i=”1″ _address=”3.1″][et_pb_column type=”1_4″ _builder_version=”3.27.2″ _i=”0″ _address=”3.1.0″][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”3.27.2″ _i=”1″ _address=”3.1.1″][et_pb_text module_class=”noindent” _builder_version=”3.27.4″ _i=”0″ _address=”3.1.1.0″]<\/p>\n
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Jon DeCles studied music with Karl-Heinz Stockhausen in the early 1960s and with Ron Morgan in the late 1960s. In the 1970s he reviewed music and theater for newspapers in the San Francisco Area. His score for The Extra-Terrestrial Hamlet<\/em> was well received, and the Las Vegas premier of his large orchestral work The Crucified Forest<\/em> also garnered positive reviews.<\/p>\n