The sun shines brightly overhead on a warm summer morning, but you still find yourself chilled as you wander through the ancient ruins of a city, now fully overgrown deep in the forest. This place is forbidden, the entire forest said to be cursed. You know nothing of who might’ve once lived in this sprawling stone metropolis, but your imagination soars as you gaze around at the marble pillars shrouded by foliage, the moss-covered mosaic cobble streets, and the majestic fragmentary statues which remain so lifelike as to seem as if they were once the citizens themselves. It’s no wonder that this place is feared. It must’ve been like a city of the gods, except that it was always inevitably doomed. It’s a familiar story, man challenges the gods, and in his hubris, for a brief moment, convinces himself that those gods have been defeated and replaced, forgetting that it is not the gods who prevent us from entering their domain, but instead simply the passage of time, the curse of mortality.
The production here is very cold and digital. It sounds as if the composition is programmed rather than performed, everything very rigidly quantized, and the instrumentation is raw General Midi sort of fare. In fact this sounds a bit like straight-up midi music, like .mid files rather than mp3s. That’s not meant as a criticism. I actually think there is something quite cool about that, a pure focus on composition to create an original expression within the shared language of GM sounds. Of course there’s nothing especially unique about this approach to DS, even back in 2003, but one interesting deviation is the extensive use of a distorted tremolo guitar sound, which I’m pretty sure is not an actual guitar but rather another sample-based sound. This has the interesting effect of making the album still seem to be pure DS despite the addition of the metal timbre, just because it still sounds so much like a keyboard.
The composition is fairly sophisticated. There is a good deal of contrast between long and short riffs, and always new elements being introduced. This is one that can benefit from a focused listen I think, rather than just relegating it to the background. And structurally there seems to be a journey in mind. Rarely are previously-heard riffs repeated, to the extent that it may require multiple listens to really get a sense of these tracks as cohesive songs, not something that is meant to be immediately accessible and hook the listener at first glance. At times it is even a bit dissonant, seeming to intentionally try and repel the listener, such as the track “Her Sombre Horizons.” Those tensions are generally resolved though, clearly a lot of thought having gone into how the path develops over time. The struggles are intended and rewarded with a satisfying course of rumination.
The mood is gloomy and melancholic, never overtly sad, but there’s a sense of coldness and being weighed down, and a deep loneliness. The sense of isolation makes the album title, Empires, seem somewhat ironic. The last image this music brings to mind is throngs of people, marching armies, and towering monuments. What this album evokes for me is ruins of empire, everything having crumbled long ago and now being overtaken by the one true empire, nature herself. In that way it seems to me the concept is largely a reflection upon the fact that no matter how big and seemingly all-powerful they become, all empires still fall. Like our own short lives, it is the condition invariably shared, that everything dies. But hope is not lost because always corresponding with that tragedy of inescapable loss is rebirth. Life will always find a way to reemerge and eventually thrive, and with it vast empires which might stretch on into incomprehensible millennia, perhaps free and glorious or perhaps cruel and tyrannical, but they all will meet their end eventually. Even all memory of their existence will fade, and so we are just left to wonder and marvel at the vast cosmic scope of what once was and now forgotten.
Right now the only way I'm aware of to listen to Neptunell - Empires is by downloading the four tracks individually (“empires1.zip,” “empires2.zip,” “empires3.zip,” and “empires4.zip”) from this website: https://files.scene.org/browse/music/artists/neptunell/
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