One of the things that I abhor about end of the year lists are the gems that slip between the cracks or are only realized after the “Top Albums” have been codified. Dark Light In The Wake of Silence is one such gem and was tipped off by its humble creator in a thread on eMusic’s message boards who had just noticed that it had been added to the service’s available albums. This is an album that by all rights would have passed under my nose without me taking much of a second glance having been buried under some 300+ new releases and originally misclassified as New Age Ambient–not a genre I dive into very often.
Dark Light In The Wake of Silence is a pensive album that fuses elements of Middle Eastern and North African musical traditions to Western concepts of rhythm and harmony. Each song is stitched to the next in a long billowing collage of movement, there are moments of rest but as a whole the album moves like a ceaseless engine of sound and texture. The first comparisons that leapt to mind as I listened to it for the first time were the moodiness of Amon Tobin, the expansiveness of both DJ Cheb I Sabbah and Natacha Atlas, and tempered by the Arabic Pop styling of Cheb Mami. Knossos has created a truly world spanning album.

On Knossos’ website, the composer describes the music and the process as thus:

[A]n instrumental excursion into the heart of world fusion; assembling post-rock sensibility with the complexity of IDM, D&B and Abstract electronica. Featuring a myriad of eastern instruments in an environment blurred with ambient guitar clusters, electronic glitch, and dense rhythmic intensity.

It is an apt description and its realization is well executed though my only complaint is that on occasion the most delicate and often most interesting passages played on the stringed instruments are swallowed up in the mix. While the notion of decomposing the work into less discrete passages of ambient and soundscapes there is, for me at least, a perceptible loss of the original vision. However, stepping slightly farther back from the work and can be heard that Knossos is creating a future perception of traditional works and in that they succeed.

Ruhsuz, while shedding many of the layered effects found in many of the songs, conveys the concept of tradition as seen through futurism by using an infectious hook that sounds most at home on a clear night under an expansive sky but is bound tightly to sharp drum programming. The result is a song the evolves from a bare structure of melody and rhythm into a passionate dance piece. Similarly, Unknown To The Sea has an oud and bass playing counterpoint all awash in pink noise and soft pads further blurring the lines between what should be yesterday and tomorrow.

If Dark Light In The Wake of Silence is any indication of Knossos’ talent and vision I will certainly be eagerly anticipating their next release. Highly recommended.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Music, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.