NEON – au theatre de sons imaginaires

(CD, Poeta Negra)

Shortly after I wrote about his first debut solo-recording (on a split 7“ with Monika on gracetone) I stumble over the name Chris Setel again on a wonderful ambient, post rock, electronica album, produced under the name of Neon together with another musician called Byron. „au theatre de sons imaginaires“ is alltogether a blur. And a riddle. On the one side the tracks seem to be strongly composed, worked at and built the way they move, evolve and work. But after a while everything seems to fade into shades of hazy colours and gentle pulsing drones of delicious tones. Then all the titles are in French and probably form a beautiful poem if re-constructed in the right way. And while minutes waste away in this comfortable stasis the right questions never arise and the answers seem to float on by in the distance. This album makes Anders Dahl’s „hundloka“ seem like a songwriter album and Emanuele Errante’s „migrations“ like an exercise in classical composition. A theatre of imaginary sounds indeed, but one that seems to make everything else imaginary as well.

Is it really true that music that flows and ebbs in a steady blur like this one here has no structure? Or is that rather a nominal definition of having grown up surrounded by music with a beat? Except for the few tracks that use vocal samples such as „fantomes“ (from movies I guess) or the spooky „la“, every track on here sounds like he has fallen into a swirling stasis that takes the soundscapes out of the time-continuum, so that every moment you listen could be every other moment you listen as well and actually is every moment at the same time. Maybe this thinking in the fifth dimension (remember, we live in a four-dimensional world with time being the fourth dimension) is so uncommon to us that the attribute structureless gets thrown at music like this very quickly.

This is not just idle thinking, because to music the dimension of time is the most crucial one. Paintings have to invent the third dimension, literature has to invent all dimensions, architecture works three-dimensional. Composition is one-dimensional, but it tries to form our perception of this dimension and time being the most magical, enigmatic and unsolved dimension of all. Augustinus said in medieval times already: „I know exactly what time is, but when I want to tell somebody, I have no idea what it is“ (paraphrased, because I don’t remember the correct wording and moreover I didn’t read it in English). So, if Setel and Byron found a way to release music from this confinement of dimensionality and managed to hint at a way of experiencing music that releases the listener from the same confinement, then that is a very important thing.