The collapse of the record industry and the proliferation of inexpensive tools for independent recording and distribution have meant, in many ways, a liberation of artistic expression. On the whole, then, that’s a good thing: pretty much anyone can put out pretty much whatever he or she wants. On the downside, though: pretty much anyone can put out pretty much whatever he or she wants.
Midnight Odyssey‘s new double album, Shards of Silver Fade, works as excellent supporting evidence for both the pro and con sides of these developments. More importantly, however, it is an utterly confounding piece of work. If we accept that music can be a gravity well or a centrifuge, either pulling all possible elements into its ultra-dense event horizon or spinning out the impurities to find a single essence, then Midnight Odyssey somehow manages to steer both of those ships.
“Darker Skies Once Radiant,” for example, sounds like Enya and the Magnetic Fields collaborating for a Cleopatra Records compilation. The first several minutes of album opener “From a Frozen Wasteland” sound like the Handsome Family‘s “If the World Should End in Ice” smashed and smeared into a frosty, ambient drone. The closing title track, in turn, sounds like One Second-era Paradise Lost curating a Hearts of Space radio broadcast while covering the first half of Smashing Pumpkins‘ “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans.” In fact, for as distant as Midnight Odyssey’s bleep-bloopy/goth/drone/atmospheric/ambient/Laika (the dog, not the band, dummies) black metal is from the Pumpkins’ peak-era prog-grunge, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is actually a pretty decent reference point: Both albums are brilliant in their stupidity of excess.
Dis Pater’s clean, often octave double-tracked vocals sometimes feint neofolk and other times new age. Sometimes you will listen to something that sounds like if Mortiis applied the aesthetic from The Smell of Rain to Fodt til a Herske‘s compositions. The overriding point is that there is literally no objective metric by which to judge something like this. At times, Shards of Silver Fade is less like an album and more like a thing that happens to you. To call it passive does a disservice to Dis Pater’s vision, but it’s just as fair to say that Dis Pater’s inability to self-edit does a disservice to his vision.
The inescapable point: at nearly two and a half hours, this is not an album but a monument to stubbornness. It stretches on infinitely in every direction: twinkly synths to the horizon here, mechanical drumming beyond the mountains there, a wash of muted guitar fuzz and vocals straight to the firmament above. The listener can enter this experience at virtually any point and find the view unchanged; Midnight Odyssey has pioneered the album as a fractal.
So who is Midnight Odyssey for, exactly? Certainly you could say that it’s for the same sort of folks likely to be tickled by the sprawling, itinerant spaciness of Spectral Lore, Progenie Terrestre Pura, Omega Centauri, or even Limbonic Art. You could also say that it’s for anyone who ever obsessed over the landmark Unquiet Grave goth compilations but then fell under the witching spell of black metal. You could say all of this and much more. But it seems the answer is much simpler: this is not for you, or me, or anyone else save one: this is music spawned by and for its creator alone. As such, its single-mindedness and utter lack of giving a shit whether you like it or can even sit through it is equal parts admirable and asinine.
Much like the universe, then, and every bit as aleatory – every bit as wondrous.
