Third Eye Foundation The Dark. There was mention by someone earlier of witches and I meant to make this entry an exposition about darkness. I enjoy the dark. I like how the evening world condemns the sun and the horizon crushed into a few feet outside of your being. I like when I hear voices in the night from around corners, on other stoops, in distress over unimportant matters. The day has so much less mystery. But then Trish Keenan died. I had posted a pointless bit of fluffy remembrance. I deleted it. I just read Bob Stanley's lovely bits about her. I didn't know her. Obviously. And perhaps I believed I was lucky because the only contact I had with Trish Keenan was through her beautiful creations. What success to live such a short life and to leave behind so many beautiful things to caress, to spread grace, to enthrall. And while the quest to make and disseminate beauty is not the most important calling it is a noble one. I've never created anything beautiful. If I had ambition and if I was the sort of person to make goals my goal would be beauty. To live it, to search it out, to create it, whatever. It has proved elusive. Why write of Trish Keenan in a Third Eye Foundation entry? Because the very first song has the feel of a lament. Actually all of the record has a feel of a lament, a requiem--for no one in particular but an evocation of the macabre and the remoteness of human existence at the end. She died without anyone being prepared for her death. It seems a shock to me and I am but a lonely fan thousands of mile from anywhere she has ever been. And so the distant moans, the icy keys and repetitive percussion seem farther away from moroseness and seem almost comforting in the unseasonable warmth of one January evening. It is the only evening of january 17th I will ever experience but then we take steps farther into the future than those that have departed. There have been faceless tributes on websites and they feel empty and cold, speak more of the music, speak more of the grace, speak more of the music, again. Unless you are Bob Stanley and she was your friend, then speak of her as you always had intended before she departed. I don't know if Third Eye Foundation can count Trish Keenan as an intimate. Perhaps the wordless tribute of music would be best, how really to describe the emotions that wash over and away when listening to Broadcast. They were smart, they were cool, effortlessly, they were avant-garde but they didn't allow that to make them insufferable. I am certain, probably, that Trish Keenan had loads of unlistenable self-important artists in her record collection but somehow Broadcast was always beautiful. Even when they made difficult it was beautiful. And that is the unending tribute. Third Eye Foundation make beautiful music. It is a different sort. Where one can imagine the possibilities of a world smitten by the music of Broadcast if only the next Ipod commercial was soundtracked by Where Youth and Laughter Go you can't quite imagine a planet hopelessly besotted by Anhedonia. Their is a majestic sort of towering doom, intense melancholy, bleakness, as graceful as a gazelle but as fierce as a back mamba. Black is key. The album title is The Dark and it is not a misnomer for describing what is contained within. A chorus of moans and howls, a lonely spare piano part and dread laden drum and bass. It's marvelous really. And as an elegy to Trish Keenan it works splendidly because when you are a distant star in a distant universe as a reference point of someone famous it is best to not display false emotion and celebrate a wonderful existence with the same wide-eared loe she bestowed upon so many of the unduly under appreciated. That difficult and esoteric need not be unlistenable is a lesson lost on many. Third Eye Foundation is difficult, but it is also dreamy and intensely pretty. Is than an objective opinion? Of course not. The first song has seamlessly segued into the second. More wondrousness. usually the path from difficult to indulgent leads through jazz. I was reading an article or a review of something, I think it was for True Grit or perhaps a television show I've forgotten the intention but the attitude throughout was one of the smug jazz fan. My workmate listens to jazz all day long at his desk, loud enough to torture my ears though really my tolerance is very low, and it is turgid nonsense. Why do jazz fans persist in believing somehow they have reached the apex of human evolution? Even John Lennon, who was decidedly silly on most subjects, disagrees something about old man in bars smoking and not listening. I forget the particulars. I did once see an op-ed on someone who cheered when he learned of the death of John Lennon because he was an enemy of jazz. Pah. Anyhow, it is alright for me to interject my own prejudices and biases while discussing a Third Eye Foundation record because do you realize how long their songs are and for me to try to describe the maudlin excess of a track like standard deviation would require a dexterity with the human language and understanding of the human psyche that I do not possess. Third Eye Foundation is Matt Elliott and he does seem to have a corner on this monstrous moroseness. It isn't heavy handed or dreary, it's atmospheric and soaring but at the center there is the hollowness of human existence. Some may find that depressing but for me it is gorgeous. But unlike a jazz fan who needs to crow about the superiority of their unloved genre in everything from television reviews to tourtiere recipes I have a more wide ranging sort of single mindedness. And while I think Third Eye Foundation is the near apotheosis of drum and bass i don't begrudge anyone who might rather want to listen to Katy Perry instead. Another seamless segue into the third track. Truly this is two pieces. Four epic parts of one construction and then the last track which is the pop hit. On the first bit we had tortured voices, on the second a crushed bit of distorted cacophony in the background and now a more minimal siren tone all accompanied by a steady heart beat meter measured witheringly with drum and bass programming of other more sylphlike figures on the sampler. Who knew that a Third Eye Foundation record was even a possibility? Now things are becoming more pulse quickening, it feels uneasy, distracting, physically uncomfortable. Beautiful. The mastery of this record is the sense or aura that envelops the listener and pulls him or her along involuntarily through the recesses of deepest, darkest human emotion. It is as emo as any music you will hear and it is wordless, it supplants the cliche of human suffering with the purer instinct of emotion. Your reaction to the music is entirely instinctual whether that reaction be found in revulsion or in bliss. I bet Matt Elliott has loads of jazz records and surely there are some jazz obscurities compressed and mutilated beyond recognition except by autopsy hidden within these epic tracks but I can love jazz influences even as I despise jazz and jazz fans. It is all so circular and claustrophobic now. He doesn't make records to be consumed lightly, when listening there is a commitment required or it becomes static. i suppose a jazz fan would say the same thing. ugh. Am I as insufferable as a jazz fan? No. Because I don't think this music is important in any historical context and in any context really, it pleases my heart and that is all I ask of music. I don't believe I have taste that is superior or inferior to anyone but it is as singular as anyone else and so I write with the selfish sense that my impressions are unique even if my descriptions of those impressions are less so. Fourth track now, the programming is brought to the fore and the glowing cinematic soundscape drifts deeper into the mix. It feels more disoriented especially after the concerted melancholic droning of the first three tracks. Again, they are part of a whole. It isn't something entirely removed from what he has done in the past, I hear bits of the first album, bits of Little Lost Soul, etc...in everything but he has become master class architect of human disagreeableness and so the dread momentum seems almost effortless as if he sat down at his computer and it poured forth from his fingertips in a single exhalation of desolation of woe. Now to the final scene featuring soul maddening disorientation and jarring climaxes and a very jazz like feeling of discombobulation, five songs all being played at once barely contained within the framework so carefully constructed over the preceding thirty-five minutes. Astonishing. A brilliant surprise. He stepped out of his dull, frankly, singer-songwriter clothes and back into his star collapsing alter ego and created a masterpiece. Last track now. The pop hit. The one that everyone is complaining about because it doesn't fit the overarching theme of the previous tracks but its genius. It reminds of the Semtex 12", small, a miniature electronic symphony of all the things you wish were included in Boymerang records. Will Graeme Sutton return to Boymerang as successfully after his own disastrous rebirth as Bark Psychosis? It is something to hope for. Perhaps a tribute to Trish Keenan and a signal to the world that beautiful things are sometimes hidden for reasons no one will ever understand. Third Eye Foundation is beautiful, the sort which thrills you with terror, the most exciting sort really.