Friday, June 7, 2013

PHANTOM OF THE FESTIVAL


It takes something very special to stop a room full of sweaty weirdos dead in their tracks. Scott Seckington's Sedan possesses the uncanny ability to compose hypnotic, robust, heavy, piano arrangements that sit somewhere between horror film and chamber music.

It's hard to describe. 

The chord choices are subtle and unsettling, but it's also oddly affirming. Like a lot of things, you get out of it what you bring to it, and there's definitely some ambient, negative poetics going on in here, but I don't think you can simply classify it as something ominous or as some sad, spiral into darkness. Maybe limbo. Maybe purgatory. But Scott's compositions never feel like he's resigned himself to the descent. There's some awesome fight going on in here, some raw energy that's herded and corralled, molded into a series of tiny explosions that, ultimately, burn away that despondent nightmare of existence. It's the type of music I hear when I read Melville or Kafka or Beckett. Sure there's the ubiquitous existential crisis swirling through it, but it never succumbs to its own bleakness. 

There's joy in nothingness -- an unbridled curiosity and imaginative landscape continually reinventing itself.

Dance on the dead man's ashes and all that. 

Sit back to this one

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