A Landscape To Visit With Your Soul & Your Senses

Paul K has been one of my favourite artists since I first heard his work with his Glitch Code album Gifted_Damaged in 2016. Since then, he has released a string of ambient, electronic based albums that challenge the listener to immerse themselves in the music and to open their minds to the images and thoughts that the albums conjure up. Every album Paul has released has challenged me both intellectually and emotionally, and his new release Hyperobjects is no exception.

The album begins with Diaspora, a deceptively simple sounding but acoustically rich piece of music that has hints of voices and sounds as an undercurrent. Those sounds unsettle the listener and give them cause to delve into their own memories as the echoes of their own thoughts and feelings seem to be contained in those half-heard snatches of background life. The second track, The Codex Sassoon references a famous copy of the Hebrew bible, and appropriately it gave me a picture of a walk towards a shrine. It is a gorgeous classical, emotionally fulfilling piece of music that made me focus on my inner thoughts in a restful, profound way. Continuing the spiritual theme, Metanoia, which means a spiritual conversion, reflects the way that you can be uncertain about new thoughts and ideas, but the piano is so beautiful that any sense of unease is washed away. Tower of Babel was famously the biblical construction that was designed to reach to the heavens. It was destroyed by God’s decision to change the world from one that spoke a common language to one that spoke completely different languages causing it to collapse as the builders and architects were no longer able to communicate. Paradoxically, this piece of music is very much a beautifully coherent whole with subtle undercurrents of different voices that give it a rich texture. Dostadning is a Swedish practice loosely translated as death cleaning which is a final decluttering of your house to save your family the job. It reflects the memories you are still left with after the physical reminders have been dispensed with as once again half heard noises are prodding you to think of what each of those objects once meant and, in some cases, still mean. Aphantasia, which refers to an inability to form mental images of objects, reminds me of Heaven and Hell by Vangelis in places. It is, to me, just as profound and just as powerful. There is the thought of a new dawn, new possibility and new experiences held within and between its notes. So much was running through my mind while listening to this that I can be sure I do not have Aphantasia! It is my favourite track on the album because of its sheer beauty.

Epta Chromata makes me think of a desert scene with a very faint sound of a muezzin coming over the sand dunes. It is a multi-layered tune with a feeling of utter vastness within it. The virtuosity of Paul K’s keyboard playing and the vision behind his work is fully realised in this magnificent piece of music. Hibernation reflects a state many of us would like to be able to access with the world around us as it is. I mean, who wouldn’t want everything to stop for a few months to allow us to regather our mental and physical strength as we steel ourselves for the constant battle that is modern life? It is appropriately melancholy, reflecting a natural world pushed to the edge by the actions of selfish human beings. Misophonia means a negative and emotional reaction to repetitive sounds. Luckily this doesn’t occur when listening to this track as the musical motifs repeat themselves with skill and subtle differentiation. The faint sounds in the background once again give the listener a musical background that they can explore as they listen to the track subsequent times. The stately Telepathy is the penultimate track and it brings with it a sense of peace and contentment that makes it a counterpoint to the more unsettling pieces of music that have preceded it. It is an effective way of resetting your thoughts and feelings without changing the overall feel of the music. Finally, we have the title track, Hyperobjects, a word meaning something so all encompassing and global in its effects that you cannot understand it as a whole, merely in the way it affects you on a day to day basis. It is a track that brings the listener to a feeling of complete peace at the end of a musically, mentally and emotionally stimulating album that ranks as one of the most coherent pieces of work I have ever heard.

The thoughts that ran through my head will no doubt be different from everyone else’s, but they really induced in me a sense of wonder as I reflected, not for the first time, Paul K’s power to affect me at an almost spiritual level. Although this album works very well as marvellous background music, I urge you to take the chance to immerse yourself in it with the headphones on and no distractions, so that you can fully experience its genius.

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