REVIEWS

“…Genovese’s alternate vision of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God… after its seemingly calm flow, Genovese goes into other directions… an exploding electronic music piece akin to Jackson Pollock’s paintings… takes us to some very dark and undiscovered places… sounds like an electronic re-interpretation of renaissance church music gone awry…

SKYMYTH is certainly demanding, but ultimately a rewarding listen for all those who think their music should be thought-inspiring too."
— Echoes and Dust

"Genovese immediately tests endurance with a thirty-five minute sound tissue monolith. Processional: Ascending Numinous Mountain features a bizarre repetitive melody with a cinematic feel, with eerie pulses creating an exciting hypnotic effect. The track ripples like a kidney dialysis machine…

The result is an adventurous cosmic mash of sound blocks and sharp tones that regularly lean against the pain threshold, without falling into endless noise.

…challenging and captivating avant-garde compositions that the sound wizard presents us.”
— Luminous Dash

“It’s ambient, but it has a cut-glass edge; you would run blood-red if you approached too close.”
— Backseat Mafia

“…feels like tiny fragments of horns etched into beams of light, on the razor’s edge between feedback and the infinite… the orchestra is somehow 3D printed into an endless strand of DNA... this is no vague background mood enhancer.”
— OBLADADA

ALBUM NOTES

SKYMYTH wordlessly invites us into the realm of nocturnal ritual, solemnity and tumult, destruction and union. Somewhere between song, sound sculpture, and phantom score, the varied terrain of Genovese’s six past albums plays within the realm of electronic, computer, and new music, but precludes full subscription to any tradition. SKYMYTH is no exception. That this music rewards close listening at louder-than-usual volume is the Genovese mantra.

A passion for film and the influence of European and experimental cinema is evident throughout all Genovese’s sound and video work, this perhaps no more evident than in his 2020 film and experimental electronic opera, Entanglementing. Whether or not visuals are provided, cinematic techniques and imagined narrative structures play at the heart of Genovese’s process, offering throughlines that guide both compositional decisions and the listening experience. 2014’s album Night Path explored pacing choices informed by the long take of Bela Tarr and Andrei Tarkovsky. In SKYMYTH, a ceremony of the ancients begins at the foot of a holy mountain. Priestesses gather to ascend a peak where secret rights effect collective rebirth and open glittering paths to new futures.

Computer is priestess. Genovese composed SKYMYTH into a process of software systems and electronic effects acting as a kind of spell transmuting his musical ideas into new forms he would then respond to. Some systems ran freely, constantly producing new results, while others reliably spoke back, but in a new language. Trading traditional song structures for direct, monolithic blocks of sound, these compositions free the listener to walk around inside the experience, making their own narrative and non-narrative contributions.

Take “Vatic Projection.” It is disquiet incarnate. Sustained high frequencies ensnare a tense piano pulse leading to rolling orchestral passages and the suggestion of Electronic Voice Phenomena. The music is the anticipation of what lies around the corner, the creepiness of not knowing. Tension builds. The piano pulse counts time until the inevitable encounter. Ambient, noise, pulse, rhythm, and orchestral passages are all at home in SKYMYTH. These are not songs you listen to on the way to the grocery store.

TRACK NOTES

“Processional: Ascending Numinous Mountain” opens with a plangent drone of organs gliding into continuously shifting organ phrases and expanding frequencies as we lift higher into the atmosphere. The mountain is tall so I made the music long.

“Image Storm” cuts a sharp shift in tone. Broken rhythms and aggressive incursions abruptly replace the prior track’s atmosphere of reverence and incense. I imagine an actual storm of supernatural images swirling atop the mountain, like in the movie Poltergeist. I created the music to be the destruction of religious icons—shards of glass, picture frames cracking, statuary toppled and crushed. A confusion of recognizable elements in a heap. A heap that was once a world, and a heap of pissed off gods.

“Vatic Projection” is disquiet incarnate. Sustained high frequencies ensnare a tense piano pulse leading to rolling orchestral passages and the suggestion of Electronic Voice Phenomena. I see priestesses working spells sending the old gods howling into darkness, the sky clearing. Then in the wake of destruction, latent powers rise. Will what comes next be as bad as we expect, or worse? I intend the music to be the anticipation of what lies around the corner, the creepiness of not knowing. We draw closer to it, or it to us. Tension builds. The pulse of the piano counts time until the inevitable encounter. Is it over, or is there more? The pulse returns, paired down to the pure anxiety of its counting.

“Signals for Signs” is a hard cut to horns heralding and welcoming the euphoria of the new. The music invokes the sound of a union, not unlike a marriage ceremony. It unabashedly reaches toward the beautiful while grounding and holding us in a low-end hug.

“Palm-to-Palm We Greet the Aeons”—I don’t remember how I composed this. Here’s what I do remember. When I was growing up a peculiar thing would happen on tv when the local station finally signed off at 2 or 3am. The feed would lapse to a Blue Angel jet fighter flying up in the clouds over an electronic soundscape, followed by bars and tone. “Palm-to-Palm We Greet the Aeons” is the Blue Angel meeting the bars and tone, the celestial hum surrounding all broadcasts.


Information about this project and other projects is available at www.samgenovese.com