Jacaszek - Glimmer
Jacaszek
GLIMMER
1. A faint or unsteady light; gleam.
2. A dim perception; inkling.
Verb (used without object)
3. To shine faintly or unsteadily; twinkle, shimmer, or flicker.
4. To appear faintly or dimly.
Gold leaf is as thin as air while also being one of the most precious metals in the world. This is a great visual analogy for what you hear in this record.
It is delicate, the smallest motion destroys its form.
It is timeless, pulling from both the old and the new.
It is complex, while being one mineral.
I thought a lot about how time, space, light, and sound interact with form when creating this project.
On the top left of the final cover, you see a breaking bit of blue coming though the darkness.
What you find on the inside spreads was created from a process of destroying a canvas with a knife, placing sand and dirt on top of this, painting everything black, then applying gold leaf on top of the surface, thus breaking the delicate material. From there the piece was shot every hour from sunrise to sunset, documenting it's lustre through time.
About the Music:
For the past decade or so, Polish musician Michal Jacaszek has been exploring a new, resolutely modern chapter in Eastern Europe’s long, storied love affair with classical music. His creations are painstakingly crafted collages of electronic textures and baroque instrumentation, harpsichords being swarmed by woolly static one minute and pulled apart by billowing wind the next.
Jacaszek’s latest album, Glimmer, is marked by a noticeable tug between melancholy and beauty, like it’s hovering in some gaseous grey area between both, at once both insular and extroverted. “I tried again to create some fragile beauty glimmering behind the veil of reality,” he says. “I built a kind of curtain out of dirts and fuzzes, and used pure sound of clarinet and harpsichord playing beautiful melodies as a contrast to its harshness.” This winking, push-and-pull tension runs deep and constant throughout the 40-odd-minute journey to the end.
To parse an album so deeply experiential and deliberately cohesive track-by-track seems unfair, almost ludicrous. But there are undisputed highlights—the apocalyptic crescendo at the end of “Evening Strains To Be Time’s Vast,” with its crunch of nightmarish noise and bit-crushed distortion; the dizzying, obscenely pretty tangle of Spanish guitar in “As Each Tucked String Tells.” Glimmer is, quite simply, an album that’s easy to get lost in without being easy to ignore. Don’t expect any eyelid drooping while it’s on.
1. A faint or unsteady light; gleam.
2. A dim perception; inkling.
Verb (used without object)
3. To shine faintly or unsteadily; twinkle, shimmer, or flicker.
4. To appear faintly or dimly.
Gold leaf is as thin as air while also being one of the most precious metals in the world. This is a great visual analogy for what you hear in this record.
It is delicate, the smallest motion destroys its form.
It is timeless, pulling from both the old and the new.
It is complex, while being one mineral.
I thought a lot about how time, space, light, and sound interact with form when creating this project.
On the top left of the final cover, you see a breaking bit of blue coming though the darkness.
What you find on the inside spreads was created from a process of destroying a canvas with a knife, placing sand and dirt on top of this, painting everything black, then applying gold leaf on top of the surface, thus breaking the delicate material. From there the piece was shot every hour from sunrise to sunset, documenting it's lustre through time.
About the Music:
For the past decade or so, Polish musician Michal Jacaszek has been exploring a new, resolutely modern chapter in Eastern Europe’s long, storied love affair with classical music. His creations are painstakingly crafted collages of electronic textures and baroque instrumentation, harpsichords being swarmed by woolly static one minute and pulled apart by billowing wind the next.
Jacaszek’s latest album, Glimmer, is marked by a noticeable tug between melancholy and beauty, like it’s hovering in some gaseous grey area between both, at once both insular and extroverted. “I tried again to create some fragile beauty glimmering behind the veil of reality,” he says. “I built a kind of curtain out of dirts and fuzzes, and used pure sound of clarinet and harpsichord playing beautiful melodies as a contrast to its harshness.” This winking, push-and-pull tension runs deep and constant throughout the 40-odd-minute journey to the end.
To parse an album so deeply experiential and deliberately cohesive track-by-track seems unfair, almost ludicrous. But there are undisputed highlights—the apocalyptic crescendo at the end of “Evening Strains To Be Time’s Vast,” with its crunch of nightmarish noise and bit-crushed distortion; the dizzying, obscenely pretty tangle of Spanish guitar in “As Each Tucked String Tells.” Glimmer is, quite simply, an album that’s easy to get lost in without being easy to ignore. Don’t expect any eyelid drooping while it’s on.
