ROLY PORTER - Third Law

The music of the spheres might not have a reassuring or “celestial” sound the way we traditionally tend to imagine it. In that unknowable astral darkness there might instead resound a misshapen, illogical chorus like Ligeti’s “Lux Aeterna”: it echoes oppressively amid the sudden fade-ins of “4101” – perhaps the most overwhelming incipit of “new electronic music” – reopening without reservation the breach, the hypothesis of the horrid Kubrickian monolith.

From the cyberpunk of “Aftertime” and from the post-apocalyptic metropolis of the Vex’d duo, Roly Porter's horizons had already broadened considerably with the concept album “Life Cycle Of A Massive Star”, an emblematic synthesis of the dark-ambient trajectories typical of the Subtext label. With the move to Tri Angle, the perspective remains just as significant in thinking, in sonic terms, about Newton's third law: the exact correspondence between the force exerted by one body in response to another speaks, in effect, of natural contrasts, of the rules underlying the existence of any solid element. Upon the granite-like certainty of these theorems – scientific foundations that remain unshakeable to this day – Porter develops a free plan of action that seems to want to probe what instead is not yet known, knowingly overreaching himself.

Metaphorically, the deep digital pulses could symbolize the knowledge and progress of our times, while the loosely woven acoustic trails suggest the incomprehensible, the knots still to be untangled of a system we call “infinite” but of which we may never have exact understanding.

Elements of tangible reality, like the slow arcs of a desolate cello (“In System”, “High Places”), appear much like mirages only to be immediately swallowed back up into the astral darkness, lit only by the faint flickers of satellites. The dehumanized voices, deconstructed and alternating with the accelerating rumbles of “Mass”, project us into a suffocating sonic hypersphere, which expands over the following eight minutes of “Blind Blackening”, where the sense of pneumatic emptiness and loss of the senses becomes anxiety-inducing.

Outside of a context so undesirable from the standpoint of human survival, the kosmische organ of “Departure Stage” and the synth that seals the ending of “Known Space” might seem like clichés from a sci-fi soundtrack, where instead they arrive to comfort us and restore the established order, those ancient certainties that until now have been questioned and openly challenged.

The wide-open eyeball and the indigo-colored view covering it are the reflection of a horror astralis that finds no equivalent in spoken language: thus the intermittent dramatic charge of “Third Law” catches us off guard every time, amid visions that only a superconsciousness from other worlds could conceive. A journey in which recklessness or madness will be your only salvation.

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01/02/2016