Metamatic Forums John Foxx Collaborations D'Agostino/Foxx/Jansen/ - New Album

There's not much, but what there is, I quite like. At times it's like a sparse isolationist ambient album haunted by the ghost of Erik Satie.

...the last album?

I wouldn't say I'm disappointed in A Secret Life, as it is exactly what I was expecting. Whether I really wanted it or not is a different question, but I was interested enough to give it a chance.

My dictionary definition of ambient includes:

1. of the surrounding area or environment'

...completely enveloping; "the ambient air"; "ambient sound"; "the ambient temperature"

...Ambiance as a term in art, meaning "atmospheric effect of an arrangement.

All of which I think perfectly describe A Secret Life.

Now I wouldn't go as far as referring it to music or even an 'album' as it isn't either - it's more of an audio experience; a soundscape.

It certainly has its place in my collection, and while I initially thought I wouldn't play it much, I do keep coming back to it. However it still doesn't move me or project me into John's worlds in the way that Translucence does. For me that album, really connects with John, whereas I just don't get that with this.

My conclusion is that this kind of ambient is about the limit in my taste. As I said before I struggle with Drift Music, and I'm left yearning for something more musical and structured.

That said, I don't doubt that there will be times when one of the parts comes on, at just that perfect moment when everything around me is right and it simply falls into place.

Just purchased ASL online a few minutes ago, though I have to say not from Townsend as at 36minutes duration by today’s CD standards I’d consider that to be more like an EP, and should be at a more reasonable price.

Everyone’s initial comments here, the disappointed, and the favorable, have all been really helpful in gaining an understanding about this album without my having heard it, lots of food for thought providing a clearer picture, and particularly so with the very insightful reviews about it’s musical nature. From all that’s been said it certainly sounded like something I might like, but until I made the decision to get it, it was on a holding pattern for me. For anyone who’s still in that unsure position then you may like to know that Amazon now has samples up for the whole of the album, and this certainly made the decision an instant one for me.

Birdsong also has a very short but beautifully put review there, and I really hope I’ll feel something of the same elation after hearing the album at length

Finally got to listen on headphones.
Total immersion.

There's a lot more to it that way.

Shimmering factory generators
Time running piano backwards
Industry interrupting Blade Runner dreams
Metalbeats of machines
Chiming of bells whilst I drift away.

My opinion of this album has changed.I need to listen again.

It reminds me of Music for Airports. It is definitely ambient and very unique. I haven't heard much of Jansen's solo output but perhaps it's the first ambient record to feature these chiming gong sounds.

It's probably one of the best ambient records that I've heard. For those who would like an ambient record in their collection this is the one to buy.

Well done to all parties. Like we all know in art the simplest forms can be the most interesting and enriching.

Chris

A Secret Life - D'Agostino/Foxx/Jansen

A walk through F....

Even before you play this album, there is a sense of mystery about it. The clue is in the tracklisting and the sparse monochromatic artwork, titles whose operating principle is holistic and analog. Self organising. Read slowly.

Part 1 not empty, but full of space. Light and shadow. Wind chimes and feng. Treated piano against a backdrop of tam tams and percussion. Hills and streets. Dreams of arriving.

Part 2 a hugely powerful presence. The listener, forward. Ominous and foreboding. The Quiet Man emergent. Chau gongs, black copper oxide. Intense. Bellini and Puccini, waltzing with Oppenheimer in the ever present hum of a distant machine. Melody is lonely, despairing and painfully beautiful. The sinister drone builds an atmosphere that evokes an intermittent spirituality against which the piano is crystallised. A battle of mistrust between tam tams and keys. Backwards treatment of sharp notes. Defiant. This is Foxx walking free, looking down and looking back. Experimental again, enjoying the freedom to reflect, to inspire. To challenge and inform with an audacity and subliminal grandeur that is little short of genius.
Part 3 more gently. A strident confidence. Allows exquisite underplaying of the lead. More Jansen than Foxx, more production than performance. D'Agostino's role is clear. Who is The Hidden Man now teasing out the tones, and pulling strands? Just as you lead, so shall you follow... in this track you really now start to feel the interplay among the three composers. A trinity of no coincidence. Sonic pathways start to emerge between the respective patterns. A crumbling fugue of sound...
Part 4 more freestyle, less structured. The piano's serenity belies the psychotic melodrama of the percussion. One can imagine that they particularly enjoyed performing this track, for there is teasing and mockery. A smile and a whisper. A nod and a wink
Part 5 contrapuntal. A persistent mechanic hum accompanies Foxx as he wanders through his imagination and his youth, drifting up into the blue hills outside the factory. A man at work has daydreams, stealing moments of another's time, until despondency returns - as if it never left - riding out the passing time of futurism in a chariascuro of light and shadows. Sounds like the sleeve art. Adagio perfectum.

The album could end here. Such is the intensity of the music that it is impossible to believe barely 30 minutes have passed. Time heals nothing.
So what does Part 6 bring to the whole? A sense of close and content. A return to the beginning. The peace of Bowland, where the mechanical hum is just a memory. An impression on the wall in a derelict warehouse. Remorseful, that what might perhaps have been has come to nothing. Foxx himself is distinctly quiet, almost absent on this final track. Little more than an imprint, leaving gaps.
There is something fundamentally admirable about an artist who knew at the beginning of his career that he would save the best till last.

Waiting? You've been waiting?
After all, this time, come, take my hand
And when the streets are quiet, we'll walk out in the silence.

Here is a place where he once was. The Secret is to leave things out...

© birdsong march 2009

Got my copy this weekend. Gave it a cursory listen - very relaxing. But I think I'll need the right moment and the right frame of mind to give it full attention.
Also pleased to spot it in a local record shop window.

“So open all the pieces we dream...”

It’s been a few weeks now since the first time I listened to A Secret Life, and from when it unexpectedly became an album that I really look forward to hearing, and growing to take such a prominent place over any recent Foxx related work that I’d choose to play, overshadowing My Lost City in this respect.

When I first learned about the collaboration with Steve Jansen it didn’t register too much in my mind, and as we got nearer to the release date I was still lukewarm about this album. I can’t really say why that was, maybe it was something to do with the fact that I’ve never followed Jansen’s solo work, so the tam tams were going to be new for me, and when it was also announced that Steve D’Agostino had stepped forward to be the one finally to fit all of the pieces together, I wondered about the collaborative vision, and who, or what had ultimately shaped the realization of the album. Not that it necessarily matter’s if the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and for me ASL sort of actually is, but the fact is, with all those potential new releases from John on the horizon, I almost passed over this album in my list of priorities as being the new ‘John Foxx CD’.

The very clear comments made on the forum by other listeners certainly gave me the feeling that this was a work I’d more likely enjoy, than not, but still I wasn’t quite sure, at least not up until that first moment of experiencing the tinkling and chiming sounds sparkling away in the beautiful opening of Part One, and typically it’s the one you almost overlook that sometimes becomes the one you end up loving.

“Something is about to appear...”

For me, ASL describes in its music the gradual emergence of something into the world. Maybe it’s for the first time, or maybe it’s even a return, but something is starting to appear more visibly. At the beginning of the album it’s not quite fully realized, and as the music progress, this ‘thing’ continues its attempt to take a more physical shape.


“Are we running still? Or are we standing still?”

I love the shimmering machine-like drone that makes its presence felt amidst the musical touches of movie ambience, with sounds that are undoubtedly reminiscent of the Bladerunner film, and there’s a yearning, or a long held emotion that’s being contained as a piano tentatively speaks out in occasional echoes. The music seems to hover or to mark time on the spot, only the returning piano appears to move slightly forwards, sometimes meanderingly, and sometimes more purposefully. There are a few moments when I feel like I’m not so far away from electronic classical music territory, and nudging on the borderland of a Windham Hill album with its distinctively evocative landscape cover image.

ASL is a bewitching album, but like a dream, I always feel like I’ve run out of time, and all too quickly it has carried me to the light at its end. I awake and realize it’s all over, and I’m left with this need to return again to those 36 minutes of delicate reverie. Its not an overly complex or emotionally demanding experience, but to the credit of the album and the collaborative trio, some listeners in the forum have felt inspired to state that the instrumental impressionism of the work says more for John than he might have been saying in his lyrics in the last decade, and however you regard this, it is beautifully composed, and for me the more I listen to it, the more I feel I must.


“There’s a shadow man, in a shadow room...”

Is there a route into a celluloid existence hinted at in the photograph at the centre of the CD booklet, where illumination emerges into a dark room as a man stands before an opening of light. On the back of the CD the last photograph is of a woman watching the image of a cityscape, reminiscent of the metropolis architecture on the cover of MLC, and the shadow of a man is seemingly cast upon the screen. His figure is caught in the beam of projected light as he stands behind the woman, is this really the case, or is he perhaps onscreen in that film scene, in a room and looking out at the tall buildings, a room as big as a city.

On the CD front a solo male viewer is at an intimate screening, watching someone in a film. I wonder if this film is being repeated over in a loop, or is a single frame being projected endlessly in a frozen moment of time, all cinema is about dreaming, and perhaps the viewer in the photograph is captured under a spell, staring transfixed at the screen, compelled to remain watching for all eternity.

“…Some kind of perfect life”

When I listened to ASL for the very first time it was difficult to ignore those enigmatic photographs in the booklet, and images from pulp Sci-Fi and drama documentaries rolled through my mind. Fantasy stories about individuals living in an illusion of existence, or isolationists on far off worlds communicating with others only through screens, or holographic projections. Life as a kind of interior existence, people who shy away from public appearance, or those who are alone in a private world: ”Howard Hughes staying in a darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving, sitting fixated in a chair, continuously watching movies, reel after reel, day after day”.

But the essence of ASL is very much that of the quietly spellbound rather than of the sinister, there’s more light than there is darkness in its heart. I see only the love story now when I look at those photographs, and perhaps that woman in the film is also the very same woman who is sitting in a room, watching the man onscreen, just as he is also watching her, maybe each is separately experiencing a romance for a stranger in a film. Unknowingly viewing the cinematic portrayal of the other, never to be together in reality, but mesmerized forever by the life onscreen.

”But she fades away, just as he’s fading through…”

Excellent review!

Like you, I am becoming more bewitched by this album with every play.

Cheers Birdsong,

I've enjoyed reading your full review, and also the earlier reviews by Alex S, Church Puddle, and everyones comments in general, its great having the differences in opinion expressed so well