Christina Giannone — Reality Opposition

The effect is like watching the explosion of a celestial body in reverse, matter folding back on itself, becoming something infinite and yet infinitesimal, disappearing from perception altogether. This is a rather esoteric, and not altogether very specific way, of trying to describe what happens over the course of Reality Opposition’s five compositions, how it is that one spends time in them and because of them. The mood of Giannone’s abstract, ambient works is decidedly dark, not because the forces of evil are winning, but because they produce a near-total dissolution of any notion of force whatsoever, absorbing light and any living morsel they touch. The idea of things moving in reverse is probably why the album at times comes off like a giant cosmic vacuum, sucking ether and air into its unrelenting maw, at a snail’s pace.

 

Giannone has said of the present collection of compositions that they were intended to deal with that particular temperament therapists are so fond of calling “dissociation.” This begins to make some real sense, in a concrete way, as Reality Opposition continues to unfold, where the compensatory mechanism that is dissociation – something so powerful in memory or experience that one must look away in order to cope – is ultimately a strategy for coming to terms with nothingness. The swallowing and assimilation of all recorded material and sound into a negative image of its own becoming is a pretty apt way to capture nothingness in sonic terms. More nothing than even silence could be.

 

For those who enjoy slow-moving, dark ambience with a restless tremor of life being extinguished through their own sounds – generative and degenerative. Highly recommended!  For more information