A disorientated postcard from the edge of an uncharted territory, at once internal and external, in the act of discovery—to the unease of the subject; torchlit navigations over fields in darkness, invariably leading nowhere, attended by abrupt changes and re-routes.
Camus describes a split between ourselves and the world ‘[…] perceiving that the world is “dense,” sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us.’ He declares ‘[…] that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd.’ (The Myth of Sisyphus, p.20). His Absurd is echoed by the Nausea of Existential fellow-traveler Sartre‘s close encounter with objects in the world—overcome by the bare reality of existence in examining a stone on the seashore or the root of a chestnut tree, taken aback by an insight exposing such objects as pure existence rather than the essence of what they are. The insight—‘Now I know: I exist—the world exists—and I know that the world exists’ (Nausea, p.122)—confronts the protagonist with the nauseating meaningless purity of existence.
You may ask yourself what this existentialist musing has to do with music, specifically this postcard 36 in Hibernate‘s long-running series—by The Inventors of Aircraft (last seen in a TRS profile with Where The Light Stops). We’re told of TIOA man Phil Tomsett’s recent move to the country after having lived his adult life in cities. Though there’s no big back story, the artistic tradition of nature as source of answers is implied in the title No Answers, Not Even Any Questions. The accompanying photos document a new life in a new landscape. This change in scenery, however, doesn’t bring all one might expect—no pipe-and-slippers pacifier inspired by the beauty of a new environs; no pastoral ambient comfort blanket with the calm cadences of a Stars of the Lid. No, despite a superficial affinity, TIOA has never been about tired sounds or small musical gestures, as can be seen from the earlier As it is, whose release notes speak of ‘an enormous warm and dense sound …repetitive melodic motifs over the foundation of droning, growling sounds. […] one of the thickest and richest things I’ve heard for a while. […] something really elemental and physical. […] The drones and melodies are moving slowly as one organic flood of magma, crawling further and further.’ (Resting Bell, 2010). Well, as it was on As it is, so it is on No Answers, Not Even Any Questions. Though tagged ‘Ambient’, it’s far from wispy fare for distracted listening, at times as suffocating as a Tim Hecker, or, more recently, Lawrence English, firestorm, charged with a fierce intensity, as if to signal the end of quietude, an awakening of rude proportions. After a minute of muffled field noise opening bombast heralds sequences of intense synthetic drone with irruptions of dark ambient echoed percussion perhaps depicting a bleak/blank nature signalled by title: “Rural Brutalism.” Bursts of found sound thread through the final part, which screeches to a percussive halt, its streams breaching the landscape’s limits; after which, the vast power ambient drone of “Doomed Mysticism” gets nigh-on transcendent.
Coming full circle, then, this could be the Nausea, the Absurd. The protagonist as a sort of Sisyphus, an absurd hero, feeling a ‘silent joy’ living in, and hymning, this new-found world in which he feels an Outsider, in exile with a sense of estrangement from the world. Think about it. No Answers, Not Even Any Questions—this could be the back story: a disorientated postcard from the edge of an uncharted territory, at once internal and external, in the act of discovery—to the unease of the subject; torchlit navigations over fields in darkness, invariably leading nowhere, attended by abrupt changes and re-routes. Make of it what you will. It’s all in the text.
No Answers, Not Even Any Questions is available on Hibernate.
