Imagine if you will, the year 2020. The month, March. Everything comes to a screeching halt when the pandemic and COVID-19 hit. Concerts, comic conventions, schools, offices, restaurants, closed. You feel being trapped either at your own house, your own apartment with nothing to do, but streaming classics, TV shows, and movies either on Netflix, Hulu, or Max (formerly known as HBO Max) to get through the day and night before going into this cabin fever craze.
And that’s where saxophonist, flutist, and composer Theo Travis steps in to create a long-form improvised instrumental piece for duduk, which is a woodwind instrument from Armenia. Often described as “the saddest sounding instrument in the world”, Theo took a chance by making a one-hour meditated arrangement to clear your mind over the troubled times people went through four years ago.
Steven Wilson, who had worked with Theo on his solo albums (The Harmony Codex, Hand.Cannot.Erase, The Raven that Refused to Sing, Insurgentes), and collaborated with him by previously mixing and mastering many of his solo albums (Transgression, Heart of the Sun, Earth to Ether, Slow Life), brings in his assembled soundscapes to capture the mood on what was going on during that time frame. It puts you through a meditated trance, revealing all of the craziness, the dystopian wastelands, and the structures that Travis pours his heart and soul into the duduk.
There are moments where you feel you are walking into an emptiness in the heart of the entire city where there’s nobody around, going in and out of the buildings, you can almost feel a pin drop with a time frame, revealing all of the ghost-town structures, unveiling in front of your very eyes.
The soundscapes Wilson produces, expresses the loneliness on the characterisation of this person, knowing that things will never be the same after the lock down is over and done with and people will come back to their normal lives. What makes it so unique on here is that it sounds like the Berlin School of Music that Wilson carries in his briefcase.
Whether its Popol Vuh, early Pink Floyd, Klaus Schulze, Brian Eno, Vangelis, or Tangerine Dream, he puts all of the source material, right in front of Travis by getting an insight on how he wants to accomplish the mission. And they both get the job done to bring in that form of guidance to people around the world, listening and hoping things will be different, here and now.
When I hear Travis playing those high-end notes in the composition, you feel as if he’s continuing where Vangelis had left off after the events of the 1982 sci-fi cult classic Blade Runner and extending the intro of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ to get an insight vibration, walking into these deep, dark cavernous caves that he and Wilson are walking into.
They see the crystals, they see the beauty, and seeing all of the shimmer, brightening up the entire Naica mines to reveal its true form. There is some beautiful droning, middle-eastern atmospheres to capture the landscape with its camera-eyeing view. And it’s a sign to keep your mind cleared by closing your eyes, and reveal something out of this world that’s about to open up.
