3 SECONDS OF AIR – the flight of a
song
(CD/vinyl, tonefloat)
3 Seconds of Air release their
debut album “the flight of song” on tone float records. Hmmm, taste the
associations to the words in this very formal sentence – “air”,
“flight”, “tone” and “float” – let them melt in your mind for
a bit and you’ll get a good picture of what this album is about. Gently
flowing and ebbing tones from guitars, manipulated to whirring and flirring
soundscapes with counterpoints of warm bass pulses. Yet “the flight of a
song” is neither ambient nor drone, because it is too fragile and soft for
the first and too versatile in all its static for the latter. It is more a
meditation on the absence of a structural framework and on the organic way
parts can structure themselves if given the liberty. Ethereal, ephemeral,
trancelike and soft. Yet it also is ambient and drone in a fusion of what is
good, nice and welcoming in both watered down genres.
Dirk Serries (Vida Obmana; Fear Falls Burning),
Paul Van den Berg and Martina Verhoeven peruse three vintage guitars (one of
them a bass), three sets of amplifiers and pedals, to levitate to a higher
form of communication. Serries and Van Den Berg had been exchanging notes
for a decade before the trio hid away in a chapel in Belgium in the winter
for two days to record these four tracks with some basic recording
equipment, one mic and without re-recordings or overdubs – a story too
good not to be told. You can still hear some crackles and noises that went
on tape not on purpose. But if the pristine beauty of these recordings is
anything to go by, then it must have been a fucking awesome place of
impressive silence. The shortest of these four tracks is close to a quarter
of an hour (the longest somewhere above twenty minutes) which tells me that
wherever they did the recordings time plays a completely different role than
around here in the big city lights. The call of the rural ease of country
life is hidden in there, where live is not counted by days, hours or minutes
but by seasons.
The tonality – and actually
these four tracks are all about tonality and not a lot else if you stick to
the basic musical impression – changes over time, becomes a little more
eerie and forbeboding of dark times ahead in the third quarter. The first
two pieces, “dead poets sing the sunless land” and “the heart
disintegrates wearing disposable masks of angels” are warmer, more organic
and shining with beauty. The third, “warping night air having brought the
boom”, glimmers with the anticipation of upcoming evil, or rather the dawn
of that. Nothing is fixed, bound or guaranteed and expected. Notes and
sounds evolve like the sea on a moonless night, without interruption. On a
meta-level this album is probably about communcating on a higher and more
abstract level, showing the beauty dripped into sound that understanding,
harmony and ease may produce if they aren’t stifled by the formulaic mind
of a beaurocrat.
