Following an impactful dream, (“a dream with John Cale in it,”) Gabriel Rojo felt compelled to make the album Wire, a lush electronic work that has nine songs that share a sonic palette but which covers a lot of ground, all under the appropriate moniker “wire”. “For the first time,” he says in the liner notes of the album, “I employed a maximalist approach — layers upon layers, a miasma of synthesized sounds.”
It starts off rich, with the song “Heimat,” with pulsing keyboards and lasers of sound that shoot through your head space. Like much ambient music, it facilitates a calming mood, and is a good introduction to the album with the line of dialogue at the end of the piece: “Let a complex system repeat itself long enough eventually something surprising might occur. That too is in God’s plan.” Gabriel Rojo describes his music as “Born-Again Ambient” which might have to do with his religious faith, but which certainly has to do with the transformative power of electronic music.
The next song is the title track, which is the longest on the album. It is a tribute to the things carried to us through wires: electricity, music, the “wire” perhaps of written or verbal communication. It swirls and pops and chugs, and is full of wind-like movement that sounds sometimes like insects at night. It, too, is meditative and might lead your imagination in any number of directions, particularly with a mind towards the futuristic.
The next track, “Prophet,” is another futuristic track, like hover crafts whipping through the sky. There’s a lot of activity in the song, with the whipping synthesizer sounds, making me think of how prophets are some of the “actors” in life, staying busy sharing their important messages, from town to town, platform to platform, or book to book. It almost sounds like sirens, the urgent call that they are. Like Kahlil Gibran, filling the sky with significant skywriting.
“Itsudemo Itsudemo,” which means “regardless of when” in Japanese, has a staccato feel, and gives you the sense that no matter when you decide to open your eyes, you’re gonna see something beautiful, or no matter when you decide to start pursuing your plans, you’re gonna have a successful adventure. It’s a charming piece, with a nice balance of long and short notes. And a really computerized sound to it that is balanced by a melody that sounds like it’s played through a recorder.
The next song is “John Cale,” which was one of the inspirational centerpieces for the album. John Cale, was an avant-garde musician who was one of the founding members of Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, but who went on to do more experimental and punk music solo, which specialized in themes of paranoia. This album was my introduction to John Cale. And, like Bowie, he’s got a golden touch in his music, and a futuristic vision. I wonder what John Cale was doing in Gabriel’s dream, what Cale stands for to him. If the song is any indication, he was something like a peculiar ghost.
“Spirit in the Wire,” is like a reprise of the earlier song “Wire,” maybe infusing a bit of pnuema into the original. Something of a higher form of communication. “Equidistant” is a simple track fitting for its name, with the symmetry of the piece. And “Why We Forgive” is the most cinematic piece on the album. With hushed spoken vocals in a distinguished accent and haunting music that might soundtrack a trip through a city or a building, it’s something like a short film. “Understanding why people do what they do… sacrificing our lives for lost causes,” the voice says towards the end. It’s a compelling question, wondering why we forgive, making us think of grand concepts, like peace and God and empathy and forward progress.
“Remnants,” the last track is the most beautiful piece on the album, I thought, with clever piano chords and flying synthesizers noises. The piece on the album that sounds most like a song, in the traditional sense. It could be referring to the things that last in our culture or our psyche after the ravages of time. Or simply what we take with us when we finish the album. The sounds, the spoken lines, the titles of the piece that made an impact. It is a satisfying end to the journey and ends us on a particularly hopeful and calm note.
As always, I gain so much from these ambient electronic instrumental albums, by taking the time to dig in, listen with an attentive ear, and offer my own interpretations. I never thought to go down the ambient path in my own listening journey, but apparently it’s a genre with a great amount of history and significance, and a whole lot of feeling, generated mostly from just a keyboard and mechanical instruments. The album is like a dream and by the time I was done, I had been on a pilgrimage, at once fully human and transcendently godly. All aided by the help of the wires that connect instruments to computers, people to the news of the day, electricity to its power source. A compelling listen for lovers of ambient music, or even beginners, like myself.
Prism Reviews 