(04.25.07) Surrealism has been devalued in recent years. The concept still holds its valency, but its abuse as an everyday expression of dazed reaction (“yeah, it was totally surreal!”) means its proper denotation has got lost. It ain’t unreal or hyperreal. No, that little “su(b)” prefix is the crux, locating things below, in the subconscious – potential creative source for image and thought, other more familiar routes being by-passed. Godfather of surrealism, Breton, pointed to “thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” His precursor Lautréamont had it down good: “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella upon a dissecting table”. Point being that surrealism is about unexpected juxtapositions, couplings of odd bedfellows.
Now it’s not clear what Greek electronicist and modular synth buff Bakis Sirros had in mind when conceiving his latest Parallel Worlds release Obsessive Surrealism, but it seems a fairly monochrome version of the colourvision concept of surrealism. It portrays something far from a “real” or “natural” world, as if flirting with a designer-dark dreamscape, but the overall falls short of the eponymous surrealism, obsessive or otherwise. Sirros would have needed to variegate the sound stage with elements of something unexpected, something alien. True, the signature sound may be wired in a weird enough way, what with all that cold-blooded space-age machinery jazz, but its alien contours soon sound normalized, and the unwonted fails to juxtapose itself. In view of its relative monophony, Fixated Futurism might have made a more apt title. The work dwells almost exclusively in caricature psycho-dramatized shadows, remaining just Near Dark, rather than pitching itself into a neo-Lustmordian blackness. But Sirros is drawn incessantly to the minor (key), and to what can best be
described as a Gothic retro-futurist take on atmospherics. And that is the obsessive in this album. Virtually every piece is a minor-key languish in rooms of gloom, faintly enlivened by subdued rhythmic pitter-patter or clatter-clutter, its visual analogue some kind of downcast haunted equivalent of the Greek tragic mask, albeit in a cyberman costume (see Dr Who). Centrepiece “Reflective” calls to mind a rococo electro-fiction of a John Barry theme from a sci-fi Bond movie. And if that convoluted description appeals, then Obsessive Surrealism may beguile. Its sounds are premised on relatively unmediated synthesizer and sequencer, but the retro-ism is updated by an advanced Modernist modular mind.
Opener “Beneath Fear” starts as Sirros means to go on with grandiose keyboard arpeggiations and ominous minor-key chorals, underpinned by sub-video game splats and squelches. It’s John Carpenter meets Depeche Mode touched by a post-Berlin E-muse with some electroid edges. “Into the Caves of the Mind” and “Mind mists” explicitly stake out territory within a psychic landscape, Tomita-esque retroisms vying with the odd feral gesture, some nocturnal thrum, and wee timorous electro-beasties scuttling in the sonic undergrowth. There is a vague disquiet here, as if Sirros, on a Dick and Asimov trip, seeking to turn the whole outer inner, would voyage up the neural canals through the synapses into the space canyons of the brain. Sonorities make gestures of psycho-tension, but the music’s mannerisms eventually make it seem just that, mannered. A modish seasoning of spectral and percolating undercurrents is threaded through, as if to create a fusion
of forward-referenced E-music and backward-referenced “IDM.” Two pieces stand out, the one more up-tempo, “Distracted,” reminiscent of David Kristian, another noir sci-fi film soundtrackist dabbling in IDM, the other, most effective and uncluttered, the closing “Crying Spells,” on which Sirros just lets filter sweeps play over a moody two-chord lilt. It’s undeniable that Parallel Worlds offers well crafted music, and Obsessive Surrealism will be well liked by those that like this sort of thing. But the mystery of this music is entirely invested in the synthetic cloak it wears, and beneath the valley of the modulars lies… only more modulars. Obsessive modularism.
Obsessive Surrealism is out now on DiN.
