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STANCE reviewed by Mark Whitby
Subliminal Attraction is the creation of Stefan Dowsing, musician, fine artist, photographer and video maker. Stefan is obsessed by the natural processes and systems that exist in nature and wishes to emulate nature's modus operandi in the formation of his art.
It's a familiar biological truism that, unlike us, the snake has separate sensory systems. Its ocular, nasal and aural systems, for example, exist independently of one another and, together, form a deadly effective army for the trapping of prey. "Kingsnake", one of the tracks from Subliminal Attraction's "Stance" LP operates in a similar way, and offers a microcosm of "Stance" as a whole. Intrusive beats slip into waves of ambient sound as if independent of the bleeps and bass patterns that move in and out of each other in a manner that ought to be mutually exclusive but isn't. With snakes, you need a certain biological knowledge to work it all out. With Subliminal Attraction's music it's as if the whole thing imposes itself on your intuition. And the fact that the title's based on an old blues song just makes the instinctive pulse of the song beat even harder.
Stefan's friend Zani provides vocals on "Cleotropic" that are ethereal, almost ghostly, winding around the sound like a combination of a religious choral work and the sad wails of Antigone, offering a sound that evokes Cleopatra alone with her thoughts, lamenting her fate. The waves you get at the opening of "Sea of Love" offer a rare immediate connection between sound and meaning, but anything resembling an ocean is quickly absorbed into the arms of a bass that quickly dominates and subjugates nature to its human will, following which the dub-like echoes of "Tribal Jazz" arrive as more an extension of this subjugation than an invitation to involve the body in what is ultimately, and this in the most positive way possible, music for the mind.
If all of this suggests a musical project that manages to combine raw humanity and clinical electronica then the achievement of this ambitious aim is really only half of the story. Where others have used such sonic soundscapes to depict post-industrial human society in various stages of fragmentation and collapse (Einstürzende Neubauten, Tortoise, Mogwai, etc), there's something about Subliminal Attraction that goes a stage further to depict not the fragmentation of society, but an organic fragmentation that, like the snake, is central to our animal natures and whose fascination lies in the elusiveness of its detection. It's this elusiveness that makes the shifting artistic vision of "Stance" so enthralling.
Mark Whitby
The Subliminal Attraction album Stance is available on iTunes
It's a familiar biological truism that, unlike us, the snake has separate sensory systems. Its ocular, nasal and aural systems, for example, exist independently of one another and, together, form a deadly effective army for the trapping of prey. "Kingsnake", one of the tracks from Subliminal Attraction's "Stance" LP operates in a similar way, and offers a microcosm of "Stance" as a whole. Intrusive beats slip into waves of ambient sound as if independent of the bleeps and bass patterns that move in and out of each other in a manner that ought to be mutually exclusive but isn't. With snakes, you need a certain biological knowledge to work it all out. With Subliminal Attraction's music it's as if the whole thing imposes itself on your intuition. And the fact that the title's based on an old blues song just makes the instinctive pulse of the song beat even harder.
Stefan's friend Zani provides vocals on "Cleotropic" that are ethereal, almost ghostly, winding around the sound like a combination of a religious choral work and the sad wails of Antigone, offering a sound that evokes Cleopatra alone with her thoughts, lamenting her fate. The waves you get at the opening of "Sea of Love" offer a rare immediate connection between sound and meaning, but anything resembling an ocean is quickly absorbed into the arms of a bass that quickly dominates and subjugates nature to its human will, following which the dub-like echoes of "Tribal Jazz" arrive as more an extension of this subjugation than an invitation to involve the body in what is ultimately, and this in the most positive way possible, music for the mind.
If all of this suggests a musical project that manages to combine raw humanity and clinical electronica then the achievement of this ambitious aim is really only half of the story. Where others have used such sonic soundscapes to depict post-industrial human society in various stages of fragmentation and collapse (Einstürzende Neubauten, Tortoise, Mogwai, etc), there's something about Subliminal Attraction that goes a stage further to depict not the fragmentation of society, but an organic fragmentation that, like the snake, is central to our animal natures and whose fascination lies in the elusiveness of its detection. It's this elusiveness that makes the shifting artistic vision of "Stance" so enthralling.
Mark Whitby
The Subliminal Attraction album Stance is available on iTunes
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