The brain remains a mystery for most of us. It is an organ of incredible complexity, mostly (but not only) in physiological terms; we barely know how it functions, and we can easily get lost within the varying explanations of its inner workings. It is, for all practical purposes, as strange and alien as any future reality promised by a sci-fi prophet. Electricity becomes thoughts, organic matter becomes transmissions, extremities move out of an ethereal act and we become aware of things. It’s not necessary to look out into the sunlit world to encounter the unknown – we need only realize we’re somehow conscious, we need only peek inside to find true darkness.

This album presents each simple, single “Synapse” as its very own fantastic voyage. Consciousness is only provided by the listener (if he or she makes some suspension of disbelief and leaves the consciousness of the creators aside) willing to hear in the album only the impulses of the unconsciousness, the mutterings of the subconscious, and the coincidence of all three. The first synapse occurs as the electronic (electric?) pulses fill up an indeterminate space in which a neuron, or maybe many, attempt to communicate with each other, establishing a regular beat in which neurotransmitters start to make contact and send a disturbing, if weak signal of a woman’s voice: “past is left unspoken, past is left unspoken, past is…” Progressively, the signal grows stronger, until it strikes aggressively at our ears, at our consciousness, until the words are thrust into our mouths: “past is left unspoken.” Past is left unspoken because it exists only within that millionth of a second in which the synapse occurred, it’s left unspoken because the past is as tangible as the future, it’s left unspoken because no matter what we do, we will never make it real. It inhabits the darkest corners of our unconsciousness, those places so full of the static of dreams that we can only remember them as such. The neurons reach out as we try to remember, they send an infinite amount of signals that make it all the way into our consciousness only to stop suddenly… as electricity dies out, the act of memory becomes impossible.

And if we can’t remember the truth, if we can’t know what that spectacular organ is doing within us, is doing with us, what is our experience made of? As we attempt to make a conscious answer, we start to truly fear there is none; we start to fear we might have to take a dive into the abyss of the synaptic cleft, the gap between the cells that make the synapse happen, the unknown emptiness between each thought. As we spiral down into the ordered chaos of ambience and concrete sounds (unrecognizable due to processing) that make up our subconscious, we come upon a sea of weirdness, incomprehension, the origin of all human behavior; we can’t cover it with our field of sight, and yet it stares back with unimaginable intensity. Hurtful frequencies fill our ears: the second synapse is taking place, thoughts running and transiting through our minds at a hundred spastic bursts of saxophone per second, showing us that here and now, in this moment of evolution, we’re barely in control.

We’re expelled from this terrifying place, and we run back to the fragile illusion that is consciousness, now stranger, now alienated from ourselves. While we agitatedly run back to the light at the end (or is it beginning?) of the tunnel, the third synapse comes to be. The shortest of the three, it coldly welcomes us back… into the subconscious. It is calmer, almost peaceful, but there’s still an uneasiness that intermittently gnaws at the back of our senses; this is limbo, it’s some kind of purgatory, it’s where those awakenings in which you can see but cannot move or react take place. We can still hear the madness of the unconscious, we can still see the dim light ahead, but we can’t keep going. The final synapse has ended, and all we can wonder is if we have died, or if we are trapped forever in this terribly opaque place. Without ever coming out into the light, without ever moving or reacting, we keep our eyes open, and “our” lives go on.

Then again, the consuming burden that makes up the enigmatic workings of the brain can be too easy to disperse, too easy to shun as background noise, too long to be of relevance to a consciousness that is able to be distracted just as much as focused. The first “Synapse”, that first look into the unconsciousness, is authentically moving; the second becomes engaging only till the end; and the third one seems almost unnecessary, our forceful self-loss having already taken place ever since the beginning of our fantastic voyage. An album with a start so powerful would have been able to disturb us further if it had been more emphatic, tighter than it currently is. In truth, I can’t help hoping Samarkande graces us with a new take on the brain, but next time, less prone to analyzing the meandering parts of the unconscious.