Nathaniel Hawthorne unwittingly wrote the mantra of the modern instrumental music movement more than one hundred and fifty years before its inception when he said “Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.” As these artists do not use words as a means to convey the essence of what they believe, many turned to the task of eliciting a specific emotion from the listener in order to convey this essence. Soon, specific emotions were ‘mapped’ to specific techniques, making it all the easier for a band to convey how they feel; if you want to sound sad, do what band X does, if you want to induce happiness, then work similarly to band Y, and so on. There are always exceptions, but the genre leaned further and further toward the brooding/dark end of the spectrum, until you get to the point where nearly every instrumental release tries to be dark, pessimistic, and ‘cinematic’.
The desire to write music specifically for film is easy enough to understand from a band’s perspective – it is the perfect venue for the kind of work that the instrumental community has adapted itself for. Film needs music to heighten the emotional quality of scenes, and many bands that play instrumental music create songs that supply that emotion in abundance. The problem that I find is that the music these bands make, this ‘cinematic’ music, is too simple to be true. It is music for caricatures of humanity, projected to twenty feet tall with perfect teeth and that charisma and confidence that only years of acting school can instill. Only the very best scripts, played by the very best actors, can even resemble humanity, and especially the emotions felt by a person undergoing the sort of situations films often revolve around. People aren’t just sad or happy, that’s too simple – nearly everything that a person feels is a ‘lurid intermixture’ of many, often conflicting, emotions. And so many bands that make instrumental music fall into the trap of conveying something that no one actually feels. Why is this wrong? The first rule of creating any work of art is to try to illustrate truth imaginatively. If you don’t do that, then you’ve failed before you’ve begun.
What does all this have to do with Giuseppe Ielasi? The Italian minimalist/experimental artist has achieved what so many have failed to even attempt on his latest album, August. Through transcending instrumentation and a focus on linear, yet oddly human song structures, Ielasi has created an album that is profoundly, incredibly real. This is not cinematic music, nor is it music that you listen to while at a party or driving. This is music that you listen to alone, soaking in every detail, and actually interacting with it. August is what instrumental music always had the potential to be, if nearly always hindered by the misguided ambitions of the artists – humanity contained in the imaginative arrangement of musical instruments in space.
The first track (Ielasi has a penchant for leaving tracks untitled) feels conscious, acting like a person who is searching for a solution: first contemplating the problem wearily with a droning synth supplemented with a field recording of falling rain. Slowly the rain drifts out of the mix, leaving room for a (perhaps down-tuned) guitar evoking some sort of commitment to action, even with the problem still pressing upon the track’s mind. Soon, a wonderful little piano climbs forward, announcing a respite from the mental labors that filled the track, displacing both the drone and the guitar. This is not the unadulterated joy of success, but rather the bittersweet feeling of relief that comes with the end of a struggle, for good or ill. All the while, strange scratching, oscillating sounds fill the space in the song, twitching forward and back, up and down, adding the feeling of everyday pressures to the atmosphere of contemplation. You cannot escape your responsibilities just because you have something you need to work out in August, just as in reality.
The third track, the centerpiece of August and its most ambient track, begins with a low droning that could be based upon synth or brass, looping louder and softer, a hollow whistling noise that evokes the sound of a distant foghorn, guiding boats to safety and preventing collisions through the mist. It feels like the track is waking up slowly, a haze clouding its vision, whatever tumult that occurred on the preceding day temporarily forgotten. Slowly, the trumpets start cutting through the hazy drone, rising higher and higher in the mix, filling the track with a faint recollection of the good done and the regrets that will never be erased. These two simple elements combine to create one of the most vivid ambient tracks of the year, with an emotion that is unforgettable because it is so intensely personal.
Ultimately, this is an album that needs to be listened to in order to be truly appreciated. I could go on describing the second track’s layer upon layer of powerful synth and Hammond organ, or the lovely combination of field recordings and piano that make up the fourth, but the grace of the tracks is lost in the translation, because Giuseppe Ielasi is not a man who makes cinematic music. If you are looking for a conservative, easily accessible release, look elsewhere. But if you are looking for something more, something real and honest in an experimental package, then look no further. Grab some headphones and thirty-seven minutes out of your life, and just listen. It may “produce the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions,” but we’re never cast into obscurity by Giuseppe Ielasi.
-Zach Mills