CD Feature/ OrchestraMaxfieldParrish: "The Silent Breath of Emptiness"

What is it about the stars? Poets are comparing them to the eyes of their lover, scientists are breaking apart at the weight of their mysteries and uncountable generations of musicians have used them as a metaphor for the final frontier and the finity of all human knowledge. To Mike Fazio, however, the sky is the canvas and his guitar the brush for a musical work full of little galaxies.

On the scale usually applied by music industry executives, time between two subsequent orchestramaxfieldparrish releases should indeed be measured in lightyears. Previous album “Tears”, now available again in a completely remastered edition, was published in 2002 and in between, Fazio has been active in various parallel universes as a collaborator and band member. The thought that “The Silent Breath of Emptiness” was essentially recorded on a single night makes these stretches seem even more romantic. It is almost, as if Fazio has been waiting for that one inspired moment to arrive and to follow it wherever it might lead him.

His second album is a fully improvisational effort bemused by the panoramically plaintive view of the Luna County Observatory. Recorded on Christmas Day, however, it not only captures the yearning sensation of sensing one’s own irrelevance underneath the sky’s umbrella, but also conveys the doleful emotion of a year drawing towards its close: “The Silent Breath of Emptiness” is about things ending, about horizons we’ll never see, places we’ll never reach. On top of that, though, it is also about the inspiration one can get from feeling one’s fragility and about the need to make the best from the little time we are given.

Fazio’s sound is wide and epic, his themes composed of intricate interrelated tones which initially combine into longing melodies before conglomerating into thick tonal tufts, their decay in turn constituting dreamy drones in their own right. After introducing his material in full in the beginning, he often merely quotes poignant passages, sometimes only a single note, to create cohesion, familiarity and alienation at the same time. On other occasions, things are allowed to drift and develop in a floating kind of way, with sheets of sound overlapping to create harmonic tension.

The most radical piece on the record is the third part of this aural quadrilogy, a sixteen minute series of inhaling and exhaling, each breath appearing different from its predecessor and revealing tiny new details. Growing from a noisy opening with percussive patters, a swelling deep bass pad leads into an icecold Dark Ambient meditation, which at first puts the listener in a vulnerable and insecure position, but then intangibly transforms into a comforting rhythm of sound and silence.

In the thirteen-minute “Reconstruction – Afterthought”, the album receives an unexpected recap, its motives reoccuring as if filtered through a sieve of melancholic memory. Entire passages are played backwards, tracks are combined into new compositions, melodies are twisted and deformed, others allowed to shine even more then previously. On paper a seemingly unnecessary addendum to an otherwhise agreably concise album, this final chapter in practise proves to be vital in adding a consiliatory and calming finale to a work which otherwhise profits from its irridescent intensity.

With its heartbreaking charme, “The Silent Breath of Emptiness” is of course no food for gloomy characters or rationally-minded analysts. It is an album, which can only be understood by intuition and by piecing wordless metaphors together. They may not  make sense from an objective perspective, but translate into something far bigger and more important than us. Just like the stars above us.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: OrchestraMaxfieldParrish
Homepage: FaithStrange Records