As last year’s Liminality proved, Seamus O’Muineachain makes music that makes us think, challenges us, conjures ideas with us. Not because it presents us with anything solid and confrontational, but precisely because it doesn’t. His music is made of enough space and subtlety, translucence and transience that it is the mood and vagueness, the ever-shifting nature and tone of the music, which prompts us to pursue interesting lines of thought and find meaning within its floating grace.
He also creates music that inspires thought in himself. Cage of Time began life as a series of ideas and compositions recorded on a MIDI keyboard, but it was only when he re-worked them on a weathered old upright piano that he felt they had found their perfect form. And so, these ten instrumental pieces that make up his eighth album are his most unadorned, intimate, and honest collection yet.
Here, we find Seamus O’Muineachain musing on the nature of time, its constraints and constructs, and how, when we view it as a purely linear pathway —a yardstick to measure our lives —we fall into various patterns and habits. Of course, being strictly instrumental and with only the titles to guide you, you will undoubtedly find your own themes and thoughts threaded through these same sparse and sublime sounds.
We travel from the understated opener “Far,” through the emotive ebbs and dynamic flows of “Petrichor,” and find ourselves subject to the elemental sonic downpours of “Rainwashing” and “Storms of Anchill.” And through all of these supple and subtle pieces, there is an unspoken presence moving through the music…perhaps the ghosts of the past, maybe the echoes of all the music made on that old piano, perhaps the spectre of time itself.
But that is for you to decide. The great thing about instrumental music is that you can take from it whatever you think it means; it is all things to all people. But whatever you think it means, it is the journey through its sonic realm that is important, rather than the conclusions that you come to—the thought process rather than the answers themselves. As a wise man once said, it is better to travel well than to arrive.
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Soundcloud
Bandcamp
