Vidna Obmana :: The River of Appearance

Artist: Vidna Obmana
Album: The River of Appearance
Label: Projekt
Year: 1996

A "classic" in all worlds. "When does an album turn into a "classic"? Popular culture would answer: If it becomes a point of reference for others, opening up a stylistic system of its own. From a more traditional point of view, the inherent quality of a piece of music to inspire or even force others to interpret it is the key for this implies that its value transcends that of a mere subjective sensation. Thus, one could argue that “The River of Appearance” has now attained that much sought-after status in both worlds. On the one hand, there is the original, which was conceived, composed and recorded in 1996, a time when the antagonism between commercial contemporary electronic music (mostly referred to as “techno”) and its “serious” counterpart (somewhat uninspiredly dubbed IE Intelligent Electronics) had split the scene. Gone were the days, when people could either dance, chill and listen to acts like “The Orb”, without having to feel as though they were doing the music some kind of injustice. It was in this year that Dirk Serries, an autodidact who had risen from the depths of the industrial underground to more and more spacious and three-dimensional soundscapes as well as harmony and melody, rediscovered his interest in simple loop structures. Instead of the ever-more complex algorithmical and “architetectonic” works of some of his colleagues (whom the press applauded, but hardly anyone really listened to), “The River of Appearance” is an oasis of simplicity: Short, dreamy motives drift through long-drawn, fluffy chord schemes, which rotate around their own axes in a darkly sugar-coated heaven. Echoes of acoustic instruments rise like pebbles to the surface of a scantly lit pond angelic pianos, humming bass notes, brushed percussion, opaquely buzzing choral voices - and fade away again. Thanks to its puristic nature, every tone is the birth of an entire cosmos, which ebbs off into a slipstream of crystalline reverb. It is a galaxy of feminine energy there is no “must”, no boundaries, no time and no danger in allowing yourself to fall in completely. Soon, of course, this wondrous style would be copied and pasted to CDs all over the world, but this is where it began. -- Tobias Fischer, Tokafi