After a week or two of reviewing indie rock records, I usually need a break from guitar-jangle and off-key vocals. I want to hear something weird -- an odd little art recording, perhaps, or a semi-coherent spoken word piece. Something out of the ordinary, in other words. If you share my need for peculiarity, your ship has come in. The Texture of the Sky doesn't merely let its freak flag fly; it will chase you down the street, swinging and jabbing at your head with the flagpole.
Three and a half years ago, I reviewed Discord Aggregate's "non-opera" The Attack of the Absolute Zeros, an allegorical tale of individuality presented with stunning attention to spatialization and audio trickery. The Attack of the Absolute Zeros was defiantly, sometimes mouth-foamingly weird...but The Texture of the Sky makes it sound like a Raffi record.
The Discord Aggregate collective -- S. B. Reda, Pamela Zero and A. Molotkov -- offers its own descriptions of The Texture of the Sky. On the disc's back cover, they call it "over 60 minutes of joyful tension." This seems true enough, if overly succinct. The Texture of the Sky is definitely full of, and the source of, tension (though, as my wife's response to the disc makes clear, not all of it is necessarily joyful). The inner sleeve offers a little more detail, describing The Texture of the Sky as "...an interactive novel in which you are the main character. You travel through a series of dreams imposed by the Sky, choosing your destination at the end of each page. The Sky is an information vampire trying to absorb the reality of your dreams and keep you dreaming forever."
In other words, it's what happens when you combine dimethyltriptamine with Choose Your Own Adventure books.
Six individual "works" -- combinations of repeated musical sequences, spoken word segments and unclassifiable noise -- most divided into multiple tracks, make up the disc. The tracks are not in order, but shuffled together in a seemingly haphazard fashion; "The Center", for instance, is made up of tracks five, nine, 11, 15, 17, 21, 24, 27 and 30. Needless to say, using your CD player's "shuffle play" feature isn't going to make things any less coherent, and indeed Discord Aggregate encourages it. Voices mutter, howl, chant, scream and sing; phrases like "The growth experience has not yet begun", "You are staggering down a long corridor" and the cryptic "Zabda Rect" crop up over and over. There seems to be a subplot about "getting through customs", but it's hard to tell what, precisely, that means in the disc's context; real world details are all too quickly subverted by metaphor, allegory and...well, odd noises. The music -- texture-intensive combinations of violin, sitar, guitar, keyboards, theremin and various drums -- offers no clues, either.
Despite its intractability, and the fact that as an overall experience it's often uncomfortably like being trapped in an elevator with a performance art troupe, The Texture of the Sky is oddly vibrant. It's full of life and energy, bubbling over with a seething desire to create, create, create, to push at the boundaries of art and entertainment. Sometimes it's disturbing, and on a few occasions it's amateurish, but it's rarely gratuitously "artsy" or willfully obscure -- which, if you think about it, is what makes most performance art annoying. It's a harrowing experience, to be sure, but it will leave you energized -- and oddly compelled to listen again. Or it may be the single most annoying, horrifying thing you've ever heard. Or, most likely, both.
