Zentropia - Fables of the Celestial Night
A follow-up to their room-shaking Zero Mass Calibration, Fables of the Celestial Night finds Zentropia exploring more subtle space. The duo of Darcy Rowley and Mark Bray are still beaming deep space music into your brain, but they've crafted a more intricate and nuanced transmission with this outing.
After the brief machine noise intro of "Keykeon," they shoot deep into "Kali Mist," and it is a rocket shot into unexplored space. Pushed onward by the rhythmic throb of Rowley's bass, Bray's guitar shears across multiple dimensions as it turns itself inside out. A duplicate of Rowley spawned by the echoes of the bass (yeah, I know it's all about overdubs, but it's the way your mind expands, man, when you hear this song) drifts in the slipstream of our passage, working the percussion and the reverb switch. In fact, it's not really clear how many times the duo replicate themselves in order to fabricate their convoluted and spacious breath of space dub. As the echoes of "Kali Mist" become echoes themselves in the aftermath of "Eos Blushing," you start to lose track of your own existence in the cosmic wonderment of Zentropia.
The movement of time and space becomes liquid while under Zentropia's spell. The aptly named "Hypnogogic" squishes the entire timeline of creation into nine minutes, compressing the expansion and cooling of space gases into more solid states. "Tiphecreth" contains the barest breath of percussive rhythms which dapple the solid masses of slow moving thunder and charged particle wind storms. As for "Dream Destroyer," the closest thing to a landmark that I can give you is to imagine a radio telescope picking up a transmission of early Scorn, mid-period Laswell when he was slumbering and low-end funky, and Robert Fripp pretending to be a quasar.
As Zentropia winds into their twelve-minute closer, "Samsara," all of these elements come together in a heavy, whirling mass like the center of a new galaxy. This is what creation must sound like: the deep rumble of the passage of dense stars, the whirling breath of the solar winds, the pop and crackle of new stars sizzling, and the seismic movement of gases to liquids to solids. Zentropia's Fables of the Celestial Night is the soundtrack to the first billion years following the Big Bang. Massive.
Zentropia [2003]
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