Which bring us to Biosphere’s Shenzhou, which per the suitably spartan liner notes contains ten tracks “based on the orchestral works of Claude Debussy” (it’s nowhere near as pretentious as it sounds) plus two more, and is packaged in a simply gorgeous three-panel digipak. It is ambient electronic music: no doubt about it. It is practically subliminal. You have to force yourself to listen to it, or else it recedes not only into the background but into the unseen infrastructure that supports the very background itself. It’s a lot of loops and repeating themes; its bass tones are sea-deep bubbles that shy away from inflection like moles avoiding the sun; none of the songs contain any melodic development of any kind (which, interestingly enough, was actually part of Debussy’s gift to music: a loosening of the restraints that held melodies in check). All of them are utterly and equally entrancing. Usually our modus operandi here at Last Plane to Jakarta is to single out a song for close examination and then see what it has to say for itself, but to isolate any one moment from Shenzhou’s twelve glimpses of the Schumann resonance would be to miss the point completely. These songs float like clouds over a listener, changing the temperature and lighting of the room without calling attention to themselves. |
