I love it when two separate strands of my interests come together, as they do here. If Tulipomania is a band I have been enjoying for many years, pioneers of mercurial music and scintillating art attacks, then Jeff VanderMeer is an author who fits the same description. As VanderMeer was writing the latest novel in his acclaimed Southern Reach series, he found inspiration from the band’s Dreaming of Sleep album, a dialogue ensued, which resulted in them creating a whole new suite of music – the resulting novel and album both bear the name Absolution.
Anyone familiar with VanderMeer’s weird fiction will appreciate how the music here captures something of the alien vistas and abominable creatures that mark his work. The same sense of heat, danger, otherworldliness, and strange, fractured, and enclosed landscapes are found in the music.
Comprising several songs written specifically for the project and others that have been reworked, reimagined, and reexplored Absolution is a brilliant sonic vision. Things kick off with “You Had To Be There,” a wonderfully off-kilter and strangely disarming song, a blend of beats and sonic adventure with Tom Murray’s vocals bordering on the timorous and the tormented.
“Strange,” one of the new compositions, perfectly sums up both the novel and the music that Tulipomania makes, the song a self-fulfilling prophecy, looping along through a soundscape of shimmering synths and weird washes of sound. “I’ve Been Told” snakes and struts, “Time Will Tell” is full of shamanic electro-beats and hazy energies, and “It’s About Time” seems to be woven purely out of atmosphere and anticipation, fear and frisson!
It isn’t often that an album and a novel bond this perfectly, that one seems to be a sonic translation for the mood of the other, but Absolution is precisely that…a sonic marriage made in heaven…and that sometimes feels like it is from the other place.
Absolution album order
Apple Music
Spotify
Bandcamp
Jeff VanderMeer ‘Absolution’ book
