What may first sound cosmic, or even at moments like a (very) stripped-back voiceless Enigma, the titles and therefore setting place it in what might be called a body voyage, just as its components carry more than what they seem (e.g. oxygen, DNA) to keep us going.
Just issued is the third concept release by Simfonica aka Trevor Midgley, the singer-songwriter well-known in folk circles as Beau since debuting on John Peel’s Dandelion record label fifty years ago next year. These annual issues of pure electronic ambience, without percussion underpinning the melodic flow, started with Song of the Volcanoes via Cathedral Transmissions in 2016, followed by Letters in Time (2017) based on important epistles in history influencing the last century and therefore today.
In this genre it is very often the titles of the pieces that set not only the ambience but also the experience, as fully seen with the superb previous work under this moniker. This lends a classical feel to the experience, a sense of gravitas provoking thought and reflection, as does the project name that seems an amalgam of symphony and electronica. Body Mass is inspired by the human organism in its functions including two closing maladies, although there is no dissonance in the music delivery. In the composer’s words it is a “celebration and commemoration of what it is to be human”, whereby the electronic pulsations and effects characterize the rhythm of the body itself which here underpin the melody. It is like a meditation on the mediation of what the brain might tell us if it could articulate what is going on inside.
In our natural world some creatures—even ants—can carry more than their own body mass (Freud based some theories on the animal world as it may correlate with the human experience, which Nietzsche contrasted as unhappy compared with the happier animal kingdom that seems unencumbered with memory etc.) so Trevor Midgley’s concept title seems an interesting, non-vocal corollary to his philosophical singer-songwriting oeuvre. Nietzsche wrote of the unconscious disguising of physiological requirements under the cloaking of the objective: “I ask myself whether philosophy has not been merely an interpreting and a misunderstanding of the body” (Joyful Wisdom). The music suggests such an idea in its art.
The four forms, each ten minutes or more, opens with “130 over 80,” the optimum blood pressure of health, followed by “Vena Cava,” singularizing of the two major veins (venae cavae) of the circulatory system that returns blood to the heart from the head. Perhaps an elliptical reference to the musician’s work that is refreshingly aware of what it means to be truly human, today more than ever: intelligent and thinking, but heart-aware of what is good and evil in the human condition. To be ‘brainy’ without a ‘good heart’ is an incomplete personality (defenders of robots with their artificial intelligence, be aware!). Track one is almost space-rock—between the riffing—while an eerie sequence at four minutes of track two suggests too much intake somewhere in the body. It is an interior journey through the veins and arteries into the system of what we rarely think about yet functions independent of that knowledge.
“Pneumo Thorax” suggests what happens if too much air, which can cause pain and the lungs to collapse. Breathy, with a moog-like opening, conjures up waves at a cliff-edge with its sweeps, swathes and currents pulsing like the earth itself. Building up to the mesmerizing finale, the longest track “Dysphonic Voices” (dysphonia is hoarseness or straining of the voice which causes different sounds to emit) changes near-halfway to a softly menacing drone among the haunting electro-choral voices, which are muted as shades, tones and shadows.
In some way an aural equivalent of his thought-provoking 12-string guitar songs (and in the new year there should be an anniversary boxset via Cherry Red, who are re-releasing the Dandelion catalogue) it is music to either concentrate on, increasing awareness of what is all too easily neglected in our living state—what it ‘feels’ like to be alive—or in a space to aid concentration during creative or just thinking activity. What may first sound cosmic, or even at moments like a (very) stripped-back voiceless Enigma, the titles and therefore setting place it in what might be called a body voyage, just as its components carry more than what they seem (e.g. oxygen, DNA) to keep us going. It is a real pleasure to not only hear this concept experiment, surely a highlight of the year in the genre, but replay it repeatedly on loop. Which, of course, is what most of us do anyway in our living.
Body Mass is available on TM Studios.
