Aural Aggravation

4th April 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

With Illusion, The Long Night threaten ‘a sonic journey capturing the deep melancholy sound of things that are likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses, adding that ‘Consisting of massive drones, chants, and field recordings, Illusion paints the picture of darkness trying to find a light in one’s consciousness.’

I’ve been struggling with certain things in recent months. Many things, if I’m honest. Reading books has been one, and listening to song-based music has been another. Concentration has been a real issue. Flitting back and forth in a daze through news items I haven’t the focus to read in their entirety, I see the theme of ‘long Covid’ as a recurring topic. But equally, I find that people I am in regular and frequent contact with – work colleagues, mainly – are feeling utterly drained and devoid of motivation. None of them has suffered from Covid-19, and I can’t help suspect there’s more of a long-term lockdown malaise that’s taking its toll on people. I’ve felt restless, listless, lacking in concentration, unable to face tasks that are beyond my comfort zone, and have immersed myself in domestic chores and cooking, outside my turgid dayjob.

And so it is that I’ve found solace in more ambient sounds. Their abstraction offers a certain escapism, and the right ambient sounds have an immersive quality that offers a distraction from everything else. Illusion is both abstract and immersive. For the most part it rumbles and drones without any real sense of direction, and that’s perhaps its strongest asset as it creates a sonic space in which to wander, lost, adrift, but away from the world.

On ‘Untold Mind’ and the murky morass of ‘Forgotten Time’, monastic voices rise ethereally from the grey smog, but for the most part, Illusion is a thick fog of amorphous, substanceless abstraction that drifts and eddies around without direction or any real sense of form. The nine-minute ‘The Myth of Now’ is a cavernous drone of immense depth and resonance that hangs heavy shadows with intermittent glimpses of light, but the overall experience is unsettling, as dark tones rumble and rise from the dark depths.

Illusion may be little or nothing more than its title suggests, but it is all we need for now as we cling to desperately to whatever we cen. And this is worth clinging on to.

AA