Images of "the world beyond ours" are fairly common; fantasy literature and science fiction have taken care of providing us with metaphors of the unreal. Yet one could argue that metaphors can only reflect that which is under the confines of reality. This discussion could lead to a stand-off about creation, perception, and so on – something to which composer Travis Coats calls our attention. The Darkness is his answer to the questions raised, a response both alluring and frightful that treats death as the only reliable absolute.

A piano riff introduces us to the mystery of “Noumenon”, true reality, the world we cannot grasp due to the limits of reason; it is a piece tinted with the exotic, a seemingly devalued use of Western ideas about the Orient in the form of "world music," but which nevertheless makes the irony clear: there are entire systems of humanity out there on the planet whose existence we sometimes deem best to ignore. A voice sings an indeterminate Arabic-sounding oriental gesture as electronics start pounding in the background intermittently, almost as noise, they remind us there is always something strange in believing we’ve understood that which we touch, see, and hear, something that whispers of its death as an entity as soon as we’ve appropriated it as part of our imagination. “Garden” makes a sudden entrance with a dark interplay of clear-sounding piano, electronic ambience, and a heartbeat-like pulse that makes the piece sound slower than it really is; the representation of paradise in the Islamic tradition, this is a garden like no other in reality and where time is entirely malleable, but contrary to our expectations, the only thing we see and hear is ourselves, our own hearts filling up the aural vacuum of afterlife perfection. By the time “Pillow” starts lulling us into eternal sleep in a style reminiscent of Gregor Samsa’s Rest (a style which permeates the whole album from this point on, albeit more decidedly electronic and therefore faster, less somber) we’re already trying to make sense out of all this darkness.

If the album cover is an indication, then we could picture the emptiness of space as a good point of departure as to what could be conceived as the limit between the real and the unreal; their existence is granted, metaphors about them can be expressed, but we all have different notions of what it could be like, what it could feel like… space and stars are suitable to talk about life as much as about death. The two “Catch 22” pieces are comprised almost entirely of spacey-sounding obscure electronica in the vein of Samarkande’s Synapses, quite less experimental but in practice almost as otherworldly, with an open rhythm that sometimes tricks our perception of time, making the piece go apparently faster or slower on the fly without actually changing. Too much logic results in the catch 22-style death of freedom and imagination, the need to replace nothing with something (void with dark matter, uniqueness with standards, silence with sound…), the end result of which is the act of “Drowning in Darkness” while the mind tells us everything’s alright. It is a sweet delusion of jazzy development which follows up into a clumsily laid-out “His Name Is Simon”, a piece lingering in acid jazz that is full of not-so-subtle eruptions of electronically simulated instruments and samples that could pull the listener out of the experience in awkward ways. For example, the laughter-like sample of a woman crying in “Coin” provides for mild amusement in a probably unintentional manner, maybe because its volume is too high in the mix or perhaps just because it’s not a good sample.

Soon enough and nearing the end of the album, we get a “Signal Fire: From the Outside”. We’ve established uneasy communication with a machine voice that mutters something just out of reach, bordering the periphery of our understanding as sonar-like sounds and ambiental expanses weave in and out of our perception, tailing us to take the next few steps necessary to fall down into “Somewhere Outside”. After this transition into a death depicted by electronica (a death created, for electronic sounds are mostly unnatural, urban in inspiration but not exactly anything like it, they are like metaphors of the unreal), we come to an ending of suspended animation: the final stroke, “Waiting”, tells us of a place to be in the beyond. “I’ll be there waiting… for you dear / and I’ll be there waiting – for always", in contrast with the rest of the album, a simple melody occurs and it reassuringly proposes that maybe it’s not death, darkness, and silent, cold space that which makes up the interval between the real and the unreal; maybe it’s love, love for someone, something, anyone, anything… the ending is left open with a simple chord, and we can now embrace the nothingness.

-David Murrieta