Poesis AthesisPoesis Athesis was originally written to accompany Chi Kung Master Terrence Dunn’s video series, eventually culminating in more than ten hours worth of music. Here however we have the music separated away from its original functional context and exposed in a purely aural format. Having listened through this album, I can say that this casual extraction and re-positioning of what would have been an originally a contributory and essentially secondary component to being the sole point of interest is an action which should have never been allowed to happen with this music; it has no substance at all.
Frankly it is a shame that Mr Thompson decided (if he did) that this album should be released when ripped from its original intentions – each track becomes tiresome after about half a minute (sometimes less) and then becomes increasingly annoying as it stumbles or floats along with absolutely no variation or architectural formal ambition at all. With titles like ‘Paradigm as Supergenre’ and ‘Gold Flowers Bloom Mercury Petals’, one may expect some kind of Buddhist-Nietzschian (!!) aesthetic ideas to be explored. It quickly becomes obvious that these florid and ‘intellectualish’ sounding titles have been apparently plucked at random and have no correlation as to what may happen, or even could happen, in any of the music. ‘Could’ being an important word here as this music does not attempt to do anything; it starts, drifts - and ends.
So perhaps this could be used for meditation, in which case I would have to make a case for saying that when trying to be calm and introspective, something continually repeating itself in the background would only result in having less ability to attain a higher and deeper sense of calm.
On one good note, it is superbly manufactured: coming in a very sleek fold out case and with everything on the album being immaculately recorded, even if bubble-wrapped in a huge amount of reverb.
Apparently, Thompson’s has been heralded as “A composer of the highest caliber” and that his “creativity has NO ceiling” (not my capitals). The sources of these quotes are not sited in the blurb that came with the CD and therefore I have to strongly call into question their authenticity as, on this offering, I would vehemently disagree. I presume this is exactly what was needed for a Chi Kung video but it is well out of its depth in the CD market.
: : Robert Scott Thompson/Poesis Athesis - Boomkat/iTunes.
