Music Style Abstract Experimental Ambience

Similar Artists aphex twin, muslimgauze, dj spooky, the orb

Group Members Andrew Pinaire and Matthew Blakeley

Press Reviews Abstractology: The Strangelove Session and Subliminal Psychosis When it comes to Abstractology and their music, there are going to be distinctly two camps of opinion: those who really love it and those who really hate it. There's a perfect explanation for this distinction, but first I should explain what this music can do. (To even call it music is already misleading; it's more like a construction of eerie sounds that conform to a structured musical format.) Abstractology does not require the attentive ear but rather a mind willing to be filled or even be drawn into the whims of the Freudian id. It's not anything that the music does; it's where it leads you, acting as a superconductor superceding your conscious thought past the superego at sublight speed, catching your conscious self fully unaware. All the thoughts kept from you in your conscious waking self, your thoughts your unconscious mind leaves you to interpret through the symbolism of dreams, manifests itself in a nebulous yet concrete way, distant but attainable. It's at that time the mind snaps into the Sartrean reflected self, and you realize the thoughts that confront you. This is where you discover whether you love or hate what this "music" has done, this superconductor to the subconscious mind. The first album I listened to was The Strangelove Session. It didn't seem like something you would listen to while driving in your car, so I opted to listen to it at night before I went to sleep. As I was lying down on my bed, listening, I felt myself suspended in limbo between measurable waking hours and interminable sleeping time. I found myself not quite sleeping but not quite awake either. The experience was exactly that of being knocked out. Years ago, I smacked my head on pavement, and I was floating in this infinite and gentle and cold blackness, and when I woke up, I was flushed in physiological pain. The experience was very similar to this one: the same floating feeling, the same unregarded infinite darkness, and the same comfortable coolness. When I realized where my mind had floated, the pain of what I was confronting rushed in, and I realized what this superconductor to the human psyche was capable of. Those who love it love the fear of self-confrontation within that infinite self and the subsequent calmness of knowing the secrets of who they are and what are the real thoughts that make them tick. These same reasons are why someone would also hate it. Sometimes knowing too much about yourself drives you toward anguish, but that same anguish is experienced by those who love Abstractology; what drives them past it is their search for their self beyond the layers of the conscious human mind. The way I'm relaying what this "music" is like is as if I'm describing a drug experience, a sort of consciousness expansion, but that's what Abstractology successfully accomplishes sans the pharmaceuticals. Andrew Pinaire, one of the heads behind Abstractology (the other being Matthew Blakeley), had these comments about "ambient music": I like to think of ambient music as an accompaniment to silence, interweaving and projecting sounds into the surrounding empty space that's ever present around us, creating an existential relationship between our subconscious mind and our environment. The many different genres of ambient provide different examples and different moods for us to experience and create. And within these genres, come sub-genres, and sub-sub genres, and too many labels to even make any sense out of it, but the one constant factor that seems to remain in all types of ambient music, is the fact that it remains in the background, just out of focus, right beyond the outer realm of our conscience spectrum of perspective, and that's where it all happens, and to me, that's what it's all about." Review by: Kris Sevillena 7/02 Verbicide Magazine

Location Rochester, NY - USA

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