[Reviewed by Iaha Crax]
A collapsar is a collapsed star that manifests as a black hole, but is also this French project which has created here one of the finest dark ambient records.
The record starts with an introduction to the images the artist has begun to illustrate: “An Introduction To Black Holes” with the means of a typical pulsating sonic movement, alternately implodes and deflates itself envisioning the final stage of a dying star. Passing the black hole we enter “Into the Wormhole” and traverse the space-time continuum from one point to another. We are carried by whirling electrified sound textures in continuous reshaping and rearrangement. The French artist plays on very impressive visual effects and he masters passionately the art of conveying sounds into pictures. This track brings into the listener’s visual field an endless tunnel along with the feeling of a journey, but what is intriguing is that human reactions or sensitivity are totally lacking , and what remains is the pure image.
At the end of this wormhole we are “Passing the Gate”. A completely new dimension opens to our imagination, a formless and immense space where the music of the spheres captures our deepest fascination. A solemn ceremonial feeling accompanies the listener when he slowly moves on accords of unknown origin, far out of the common perception. The sounds are evanescent touches of sheer ambient delicacy that envelop mind and soul in a hypnotic aura of metamorphosis. Beyond this gate, our mental state loses its fluency and compatibility with cognition and merges into an indefinite absence, unconsciously remorphed to experience the “Event Horizon”. If you reach out this boundary of spacetime, events, changes, mental or physical conceptual movement, can no longer affect the being. The concept is taken from relativity and its theories referring to spacetime perception. As mind and corporeality are defined in a sum of interconnections with the exterior, there is a point of no return, where these connections with the external are interrupted. This state of non-being is illustrated in an accurate flowing light-sound geometry, drawing a sketch cartography of this hiatus between observer and observed. The graciously moving sound reaches an explosive soundness of monolithic texture in momentary paradoxes, alluding to this inexpressible state.
Once experienced, the unexperienced possibilities become infinite. The Nariai, an unthinkable expansion of spacetime conceptual theory, seems to take visual life in front of our closed eyes, with the help of a galactic evocation summoning the dark matter of black holes. The human voice sides with elemental ambient forgery into abyssal dimensions of sound. The mind is absolutely indulged to the core of this cosmological alchemy and regains its primary locus, the expansion and origin of the universe. Infinity is infinite, a tautology showing the very way to explore the infinite. Willingly or not, we have been taken in a perplexed roam across plurivalent sides of the cosmos, and at the end of this work the artist offers in full mastery hints at the “The Way To Infinity”. The path seems mysterious and mental-crushing as leaden noise textures meet doom-layered alarming sounds that advance to an ever postponed paroxysm.
What a magnificent cosmic journey has the artist managed to put into sound! Undoubtedly Collapsar is now an etalon and a project to always be followed by the listeners. Until a future record we can only delve deeper and deeper into “The Event Horizon” with the certainty that magical, undiscovered sonorities can always emerge to the surface of our mind.
Collapsar – Beyond The Event Horizon
Malignant Records, TUMORCD38
CD, 2009
Santa Sangre 