Yes to Fear, Yes to Desire. Even before giving the album a listen, we’re already confronted with a powerful, simple assertion. Popular culture constantly tells us to negate, among others, those two aspects of our existence, associating them with a negativity upon which many types of control are built: fear is the realm of the unstable (and we should strive for stability), it is cowardice (and we should strive for braveness), the feminine (and we should strive to be masculine), the irrational (and we ought to rationalize absolutely everything), and the list could go on; it’s the same for desire, and is connected at a level with fear, for we must not desire in order to neutralize potential transgressions and revelations about what is imposed upon us and therefore about who we might really be. But like an undercurrent, like our circulatory system, both fear and desire nurture our movement and develop a creative tension with the outside world: a strong, minimalistic, semi-neoclassical core disturbed by subtle, delicate electronics. Stillness gives way to motion and vice-versa; an erotic dynamic made of dreams immersed in mist leads our minds into sublime, tranquil, meditational obscurity.

Ambience, as a unity, a layered whole of elegant, quietly experience-changing inertia, comes to resemble our own beings, and as Panoptique Electrical lays down suggested paths of slow, fearful intensity, our consciousnesses can finally close their eyes and let us get in touch with our bodies, reclaiming them from the schizophrenic division from the mind in that shining, sublime state in which sleep has already taken hold of us but we haven’t still completely let go. This is where we can be truly ourselves, our fears at last given shape, our desires unhinged, our reason finally coexisting with everything it denies and keeps imprisoned – it lets us live as wholes. The video for “The Free Form” (which you can watch in Panoptique’s Myspace) is, in this sense, a guide: two bodies coexisting, an essential duality brought forward in a vision of Rembrandt-like tones and androgynous nudity framed by our own position behind the camera lens as voyeurs, craving that freedom, wanting that hope drawn in somber colors by a minimal string phrase, giving in to the slight eros of the idea of being complete.

Each instrument is given a proper introduction as well as a proper role in the creation of an open-ended atmosphere; diversity shakes the minimalistic monolith and turns it into a multifaceted, incomplete-sounding (in a good way) panorama. “Some Rooms Become Us”, a definite highlight of the album, shows us that minimal ambience is not necessarily of a “long duration” (changing over time at a prehistoric rate) - modifying the instrumentation until it sounds like an accordion that inexorably washes away our rationalized limits and lets us flow with it as liquids, sometimes static, sometimes rapid, sometimes like saviors, sometimes like destroyers. A piano line becomes recurrent; we wake up within the dream feeling “The Fear of Being Beautiful”, our perpetual self-denial followed by “The Desire to be Beautiful”, an overcoming of low-pitched electronics. Even if the names of the tracks at times provide for unreachable personal mysteries, the music is beautifully coherent, and the theme isn’t hard to follow throughout the album: a virtue, I believe, among the usual quasi-purposelessness and lack of aim in many an ambient record. Yes to Fear, Yes to Desire, however, does suffer from a couple of awkward transitions (like going from “The Desire to be Beautiful” to “Framed by Clouds”) as well as a couple more short tracks that seem rather out of place, lacking the depth of the longer ones, a lack which transforms them into moments of awkwardness too.

In the end, we might feel an impressive pull towards ourselves; if an ‘atmosphere’ implies an external situation seen, Panoptique Electrical turns the term around into an internal feeling that suggests us to move beyond all those cultural, social pressures and find true balance in the blurring of borders, lines, and limits. If you don’t, you’ll still have listened to a most interesting album that is not entirely minimalistic or ambient, lingering darkly, peacefully, among both.

-David Murrieta