Album by Stephen Philips, Hypnos Records 2007

I hear the rain at night on a November evening, and am again reminded of my brush with Japanese aesthetics from my last Electron entry. This time the raindrops speak of a concept called mono no aware ("moh-no no awah-re") which expresses a feeling of transient and melancholy beauty. It's related to wabi-sabi but it's not the same thing. It's hard to explain in words (the linked article is only somewhat helpful, being doubled and also written by a follower of the late Sri Chinmoy). "Mono no aware" is easier to explain in sound and visuals, and a new release by ambient composer Stephen Philips, Into the Dark, is a good example.

Into the Dark is not "music" in the conventional sense of the word. It is a "sound environment," meant for creating a mood and an "ambience," thus it is "ambient" sound. "Real" music is busy and active, full of content reaching out to get you. Classical music is like a lecturing schoolteacher, reminding us of our insignificance before the greatness of past culture. Jazz, no less noisy, stuffs us with sonic food and drugs. And pop music, the noisiest of all, aims for endless hot stimulation and excitement. No "mono no aware" here. But with ambient, you take leave of the requirements of music and enter into a place where you are not expected to do anything, or even listen closely. You cannot judge ambient by the rules of "real" music. It just doesn't work that way.

Into the Dark is a long, single track of about 75 minutes, in which nothing much happens. (Not "real" music, remember?) Sounds come and go against soft atmospheric background chords. Sometimes they are bells, or muffled bass notes, or bamboo wind chimes, or a synthesizer note. That's all there is. It doesn't build to a climax and it doesn't press any meaning on you. It's background. The rest is up to you and your imagination.

I don't impose any cinematic or descriptive "program" on this piece, but I am invited to create a scene for it. A middle-aged couple, one of them disabled, sit in a garden at twilight, talking about ordinary things, before dinner. The sky darkens, the air cools, and just as they are going back into the house, the first drop of rain falls. Or another scene: a terrace with green plants on it, still outside in November as the leaves fly. Should you take them in or let them perish in the first frost? And yet another scene, as Philips' music plays: A pile of once-treasured possessions, now set aside for giving away. "Mono no aware" is quiet and devoid of showy Romantic posturing.

Autumn is the perfect time for this Stephen Philips piece. We are, in the northern hemisphere, literally going "into the dark," into winter and lack of light. You can't help but feel some of that transience and melancholy as the leaves turn colors and blow away under a grey sky. You don't need any Japanese aesthetics to feel that way. The length of the piece is just about that of a November day's twilight: if you start it as the sun goes down, it ends in the early blackness of night.

Posted at 2:28 am | link