It is easy to build a song, a groove, a presence by layering up lots of different elements, loading it with hooks, volume, and velocity, well, relatively easy. What is harder is to take a few succinct sounds and concise creative lines and turn that into something, well, anthemic, artistic…awesome. But that is what Hallucinophonics does on the latest single, “Frozen Meridian.”
In fact, so unburdened, so understated is its opening salvo that it is more an exercise in the use of negative sonic space, an attempt to merely cocoon the natural sounds and atmospheres of the world in the deftest of musical strokes and gossamer-like cages.
But then, out of the near-silence, sound falls like sheets of ice cascading down from a glacier’s edge, a force of nature manifest in sound. And it is between these two extremes the song ebbs and flows, a grand and graceful elemental dance, a thing of stark, devastating beauty.
And as vast and imposing as the music is, it is the lyrics that underline the story, a poetic description of Iceland’s iconic landscape, itself a metaphor for ideas of isolation and slow transformation, of soul-searching and the idea of the self, that it is perhaps only in such desolate vistas that we are truly free to encounter ourselves as we truly are.
As a piece of music, it is vast and haunting; lyrically, it is poetic and poignant; collectively, it reminds us of the fragility of humanity when cast against the power of nature, both in physical terms and as a philosophical concept.
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