Dustin O'Halloran Lumiere. Dustin O'Halloran is only slightly older than I am. He lives in Berlin. Sarah Kirkland Snider won the best classical record of the year with her tribute to Spoonfed Hybrid. Will this be so honored? It is classically minded or it is merely classical. It is at these moments when my complete lack of qualification for discussing music becomes most apparent. A Great Divide, starts as if emerging from the vacuum. Twinkles and the harmony of the spheres, randomly assorted searching for a symmetry to be displayed in all directions. Slowly it comes into form, rumbles on a piano, a gamma ray burst amplifies the moment, and then strings sigh and we melt. Would it be easier to construct a drawing or diagram of the music A map to the human heart alighted from the designer? I am not sure. I am able, usually, to fake my way through it. I make mention of some bright young thing or a Mitford and distract you from the fact that I am unable to describe such startling beauty. The opening track is revelatory, it is gorgeous. A classical fiend would find it difficult to stifle a yawn but we mere plebeians are taken aback, the breath is stolen from our lungs so that we remain speechless and our hearts beat in sympathy to the disturbances in the air that surround us and comfort us from the desolation of modern isolation. Music is insulation. Music allows you to head out into the frigid world of human relationships. A prophylactic against misery. Perhaps this is an uncommon view, perhaps people wear headphones on trains and become only slightly aware of the world around them because of habit or anti-social behaviour. But for us, for us it is an innoculant. It is a thesaurus worth of defense. Second track, shorter, an interlude, for piano. He is in Devics as well. Devics singer makes solo records. It is not the same. She's forced to words to describe her emotional state. This is candid, unswerving, less prone to interpretation. There is a universality to the emotion of music that cannot be captured by the written word. It is when I lament over reading Baudelaire in English. It is what Heloise and Abelard avoided and what has allowed them to reach across the void for nearly 1000 years by writing of the art of amoris. It is Emmy Noether working under the withering effects of inequlity to prove the power of symmetry. And these works allow images to be conjured quickly in even the weakest minds such as my own. Emmy Noether toiling under candlelight, undernourished, undeservingly banished, while a young student surprised to discovr a very different David Hillbert and under a spell by the catholic nature of mathematics and its twin--Music. It's almost resembling a compulsory event in figure skating, the required elements, the routine that is somehow made more effortless by the truly gifted, injected with passion and soul and brought to flower when mediocrity would only lead to the mundane. Emmy Noether does not exist anymore. Except in pages where she flits between her proofs and your briefly glimpsed remembrances. Where some might fall for Heloise others might find in Emmy or Hypatia even the stuff of enduring happiness. There are violins and cellos and pianos and it's so incredibly beautiful. It leads to thoughts of beautiful things and these thoughts lead to pleasure. I was speaking to someone about mathematics and how it should be taught. This record is mathematics and that is not meant as a denigration. Most beautiful things in nature and most lovely things created by human hands are symmetrical and mathematics is about discovering that underlying symmetry. A sort of edifice to construct everything upon, a double helix, a spiral galaxy, it doesn't lose in wonder by understanding the rules that govern its design. I think it is with a sense of loss that too often the leap is made from understanding to speculating on the cause or the motivation. Philosophy discovers things that are unknowable and offers conjecture without proof. Abstract mathematics discovers things that are previously unknowable and previously impossible and offers proof of sui generis. But this record is a basic document. It is mostly filled with empty spaces, nearly a vacuum but bursting forth from the empty spaces is radiance and live giving warmth and the design may have seemed by providential accident but it only seemingly. It has fallen away, now to a less precise rendering on a piano, the human divide, the divorce of human behaviour and probability. The strings reappear and together two halves with but a tenuous tether between them drifting in concentric orbits around a center of gravity. Opus 43. Devics were never this magnificent. I am absolutely fond of Devics. I saw them live. They played the Gothic Theater here, they opened for the Czars. Sara Lov had a flower pinned in her shocking blonde hair and it was torch songs and it was symmetry and it was touching and I was head over heels. I thought of telling my parents that I had seen the woman I was meant to be with for the rest of my life. With her megaphone on Heaven Please and her well pressed skirt and fashionable footwear I was mute and she was not winnable and we have met but once ever since that moment. Quintette N.1, discrete packets of music all in a row, a pulsed beam of elegance until near the midpoint when all o the elements combine to create a colloid, a compound of endearing sympathy. It takes bravery to fill a record mainly with space, to place the emphasis on one element at a time. In records where the effect is a collage it is easy to miss the moments that are off, the mistakes that are not excised, when you have the music stripped to the barest elements there is more clarity in the examination. If I knew anything at all about playing the piano or a violin's vibrato I could make a superior assessment of each because of the easy witness granted. But I am unknowing. I am not proud. Next track, a double tracked piano, by clever effects geographically removed from each other, a string section enhances the scene. It is music in search of a visual to anchor it, spinning in time with an affinity for direction. But at the same time the imagery that is engendered is resplendent. Twinkles and bells and distant tones, it is magnificent. He is making another record for release soon. He has other solo records. I am sadly lacking. It builds upon itself, a cascade, a cataract...hmm...cataract is not quite right. The inefficiency of language. I sometimes make light of the fact that official French has but 50,000 words where English is up over 988,000. is this why Gide compared the French language to pedals on a piano, the precise tone available by having a limited number of options as analog to the musical scale. Is this record an analog then to the French language and something more bombastic and ludicrous is English. possibly. I would not be diminished in stature if I were to roam the streets of some charming french country village with a boombox on my shoulder rudely blaring Dustin O'Halloran to the residents. The local agrarian collective/committee for public safety would require that children be let free from their bourgeois classes where they might learn the basic of Cantor's theorem, if third graders had ambition, and they would adopt rustic behaviours and commune with the land and give thanks to Lev Bronstein for all that is good. Last track has been playing for a few minutes, rain song, the gentlest piano and pain as portrayed in a string flourish held high above the clouds. This is theoretical music. It takes a gifted mind to understand group theory beyond the duels for love and inherent madness and while it does not require the same for loving Dustin O'Halloran it sets this record apart from the Giorgio Tuma because while this is a monument to nature as described by humans Giorgio is a monument to humans as inscribed in nature.