Monday, January 15, 2018

Music Review: Zeno van den Broek "Paranon" (Moving Furniture Records)



"Paranon" begins with a loud ringing.   Since I have neighbors now, I listen to most of the music I do through headphones except for sometimes during the day I will let it go through the speakers.    But it should go without saying for the rest of this review that this music does best through headphones.   It begins to get a little wavy, choppy.    It holds steady, only slightly altering its course.    It begins to form waves, as if whatever is generating the sound is being shaken.    There are subtle sounds in the background but this is pretty much droning through as if it were a powerful beam being produced by some superhero as their weapon. 

Underneath this original drone sound comes another added in.   It is not the easiest thing to explain but there are now two sounds acting as one.    Through all of this, it remains constant with only these minor changes but somehow it feels like it's got a hold on me.   I'm not sure how to describe it exactly, but it has that power to seem as if it is indeed overcoming all that you are and all that you will be.   It is forceful.    Now it has also taken this turn into something deeper, as if we've dropped a few octaves.    "Canon 1" ends as if a cowboy was riding off into the sunset.

While I understand that this is available on CD, I wish it was a cassette because then the two tracks could be divided by taking the cassette out and flipping sides.   Regardless, "Canon 2" begins with a high pitched sound.    It's not that high pitched, just a step up from where we were before.     A darker tone now joins this first one.     Two tones drop off to change the sound into only one now, somewhere in between the first two.     The sound kind of staggers back and forth slightly now.    The tone now is holding strong and it's kind of odd to think about how many different tones are actually used on this album.   It is minimal in a sense, but if you count the changes it certainly seems to do a lot with very little.   But, again, I'm not a musician so there is also probably a lot going on that I don't know about and this wouldn't be as easy to duplicate as it seems.

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