reviews / 2012

MOON ATE THE DARK - Moon Ate The Dark

Name: MOON ATE THE DARK – Moon Ate The Dark
Item: Moon Ate The Dark
Rating: 5.5
Author: Lorenzo Righetto

2012 (Sonic Pieces)

post-classical

by Lorenzo Righetto

5.5

Fairy-tale images, suspended and ethereal sensations, black wells of sadness. "Moon Ate The Dark" is the joint project of Welsh pianist Anna Rose Carter and Canadian producer Christopher Bailey, and is based – almost entirely – on sparse compositions, minute vibrations of the soul expressed through shuffling footsteps, tremors and creaks, following in the footsteps of a Peter Broderick (especially his most minimal record, "How They Are"), or, in very rare cases, the most essential Balmorhea ("Bellés Jar", "Messy Hearts").

It would be easy to get carried away describing the openings carved out by Carter's hands, in the nocturnal wandering of "Sleepwalk", in the watery purification of "She/Swimming", and so on. Yet these would be plastic, poetic images ("Explosions In A Four Chambered Heart", pounds of empty poetry), but ultimately insignificant. And that is, in the end, what the music of "Moon Ate The Dark" amounts to: fleeting – in the worst sense of the word, unfortunately.

The songs on the record thus become narrow, a prison of imagination and feeling, one-dimensional and fragile in their representation.

This is what makes the record a limited and limiting experience, saddled as it is with an obstinacy that compresses everything into a single dimension – that of a haughty melancholy; as if art were the custodian of some ineluctable truth about reality, rather than of unanswered questions.

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03/07/2012

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Lorenzo Righetto, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition