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LP
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K 082LP
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2013 release. Lieven Martens Moana's first album under his birth name marks an important shift in his oeuvre. While still indebted to the universe created under his moniker Dolphins Into The Future, Music From The Guardhouse shows the artist reaching the shores of his mental island, fully matured. This is where a new journey begins, a musical research program within the "composer genre". Through literature and landscape painting, Martens develops a language that is as close to the personal-spiritual documentary as to contemporary classical music. Quoting Percy Bysshe Shelley in its opening piece, the tone of "Aria, The Cloud" is set for an intimate but extroverted modernist take on neo-romanticism. The album is conceived as a play for magnetic tape recorder, using field recordings and midi devices as its round characters. Rich musical intertextuality, ranging from Baudelaire to Toru Takemitsu and Messiaen, cleverly chaperones the theater of sound, emphasizing every shift and every detail while still allowing time and space for reflection between the acts. More than ever, Martens's work is the result of a deep process of enlightening. It shows the becoming of a mediating poet who summons the spirits of Nature, of the Sensual, of the Unspoken. A quatrain of Emerson is whispered in a ghost appearance: "All day the waves assailed the rock, / I heard no church bell chime; / The sea-beat scorns the minster clock / And breaks the glass of Time." All along the deliberately chosen archaisms are beautifully transcended, making these compositions a constant game of question and answer between past and present, between man and art. This album lays bare modern man's need of myth, of classic beauty. Music From The Guardhouse could be regarded a corner stone, a blue print for the future of composition to come, a lecture in honesty and depth.
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