Introducing Plenum- A music blog

This is the first of a regular posting on experimental, ambient, and psychedelic music, particularly as these genres of music relate to ideas about consciousness and mysticism. But it's mainly a place to discover and explore some of the lesser known musicians that are crafting sublime and powerful sounds.

This first installment is a listen to some beautiful, yet extremely challenging music from the album Kristallivirta by Aan Meets Eyes Like Saucers. This group is made up of a number of musician including Jeffrey Knoch, a keyboard player whose solo outfit is Eyes Like Saucers, and Jani Hirvonen and Jari Koho who play together as Aan. I believe this music serves as an important entry into this blog.

There is a tendency in many contemporary ambient/noise/drone bands to create landscapes of decay and loops of circuit bending that suggest entropy. It's easy to follow a path of hopelessness into the the woods. But hopelessness isn't the same as melancholy or pathos, which despite the darkness, still recognizes that shadows require light.

Aan Meets Eyes Like Saucers goes in the opposite direction of many of their peers; here the chaos expands into form. It sounds like the echo of creation, formlessness becoming form, darkness becoming light. What sounds like decay is really the moment before unification, as matter finds it ways into some kind of cohesiveness.

We often think of expanding consciousness as a moment whereby self becomes formless, but this has reduced much of the discussion around ideas of consciousness as a dichotomy between the material world of form and the nouminal or spiritual as formless. But what if we imagine that the Godhead is really the realization of all things, not the dissolution of matter, but the perfect union of all things. Creation is God's own beginning.

Aan Meets Eyes Like Saucers offers an possibility that the this kind of music does not always have to point to the dissolution of things, but rather to the beginnings of sound, where what is initially perceived as the staticky echo of nothingness is really the move towards the plenum, the fullness of creation.

--Aan Meets Eyes Like Saucers--