|
Long projects are not inherently a problem. I love a good long project.
My problem is not that it's long, but that it's long *and* unfocused. The assortment of pieces, their sequencing and relation to each other -- it all feels very random or, at the very least, obscure. It doesn't tell much of a story in itself, nor about the music or about its creator(s).
You have 14-minute live ambient jazz next to studio miniatures that range from synth-y video game soundtracks to orchestral vignettes. In theory, that might be cool, but if you're going to present it as an epic album, a) the stuff has to be really good, top-notch, and b) it needs to work together. That's how you start to tell a coherent story.
I don't get that here.
(One story the album DOES tell, quite successfully: MAF is partial AF to the musical equivalent of the soft focus production values you might find in a holiday Lifetime movie.)
And while I'll talk about the music "itself" soon, after I listen a bit more, I'll double-down here: framing and presentation matters --- it's an integral part of the music. I'd argue that, precisely bc so many of us listen to digital w/o physical copies, it's even *more* important than it was previously, not less.
It's a really, really big part, and I think separating them is somewhat artificial if you're talking about the project as a whole.
There are a thousand ways to release music into the world these days. When you choose to release a set of this size, that's a choice. When your promo for the release doubles down on this by emphasizing the quantity of music, emphasizing the amount of time it incubated, and the fact that this is supposed to be part of an eventual 10 hour set... when you talk about how you chose the names of all the pieces because they have spiritual significance... that tells me, this is not supposed to be just a collection of tracks.
The set-up is that this is monumental, it's epic.
In which case, I want it to feel epic and monumental. For me - I stress that, I speak only for myself - it doesn't feel that way at all.
It feels exactly the opposite.
There's a fair amount of good music on here. There's a bit that's very good. I'll talk about that soon. There's also a lot that feels mediocre, and a bit that's just seems superfluous. I'll talk about that, too.
-thebigfunk
~ i could still snort you under the table ~
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
The Lesson
