“Musicamorosa” reviewed by earlabs

The first wave of slowly swelling melancholic loop-drone upon starting the disc confirms any preconception one might have concerning the tone of this latest release by The Beautiful Schizophonic (Jorge Mantas). The second wave of likewise loop-droning undulating decay (track 2) consecutively goes on to undermine these first impressions, and thereby confirms the preconception concerning a pertinent dualism pertaining to the artists work (already pronunciated in the “schizophony” of Jorge Manta’s moniker). Consecutive tracks only go further to annul any clear-cut ideas concerning the emotional and ‘conceptual’ aims of this release.

This, then, is not a release single-mindedly aiming at pleasing the affective synapses or the romantical lobe of the human brain. There is definitely a sense of the beatific agony, a dark-romantic thread surging through the whole of this CD; but there is way too much itching, especially on any conceptual level, for this release to be unequivocally deemed ‘beautiful’, ‘romantic’, or even ‘melancholic’. What we do have here, is, to my sensibilities, a truly puzzling, truly intriguing mixture of deep and light ambiences, textures and fissures to appeal to both the heart and mind.

I find my mind turning back to the film ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ which creates an incessant tension between a fairytale world wherein the youthful protagonist finds herself evermore immersed and the reality of war and torture of mid-40’s fascist Spain. During the course of the film, these two worlds come more and more into conjunction with each other only to in the end become radically disjointed again, leaving a gaping cleavage to be bridged by the mind and feelings of the spectator who is in effect left dangling over this abyss. A same ‘dramatic structure’ seems to me to underly the design of this release here currently under review. There exists a stark discrepancy between the dark abysmal atmospherics, the almost misplaced and seemingly blooper-like ‘outtakes’ and finally the truly heavenly spheres harmonizing with romantic, almost Dante-like sensitivity between which the different tracks on this release undulate.

I don’t know Proust’s oeuvre enough to judge whether this internal, both emotional and esthetic tension reflects an intrinsic characteristic of this author’s work as a whole. I do know enough biographical data, though – the author, bed-ridden due to severe pulmonary and other ailments, either freely choosing or destined for dedicating his creative genius to the recreation of a world which filtered through his neurasthenic sensibilities became a monument to both the most discreet and the most extravagantly lived out individualism – to consider this tension-ridden (or even tension-wracked) character that Musicamorosa evinces as attaining to at least a moment of truthfulness in the representation of these circumstances that surrounded the genesis of Proust’s oeuvre. In an almost Marxist fashion here becomes tangible an unsurpassable chasm dividing the material circumstances which surround the genesis of this great oeuvre from its ideological, esthetic surplus that constitutes the artistic product itself.

This (non)relationship between these different levels is not explicitly thematized in Jorge Manta’s remarks accompanying the release on the Crónica webpage; but his comments on his intentions (his fantasies?) with this release – inferring the analogous circumstances under which the art of both the contemporary laptop artist and Proust (both sitting in solitude, darkness and silence) comes into being – lead to the question as to how such self-willed solitude can become the generative grounds for any work so explicitly dedicated to (romantic) love. Not without any ambiguity, so it appears. (In this regard there are both analogies and discrepancies with the dismissal of the world – in Catholicism basically considered as God’s beneficent creation, aye, a fount of revelation itself – within monastic orders.) But here it is specifically this ambiguity itself which might characterize the true artfulness of both Proust and Jorge Mantas – an ambiguity which, according to Socrates’s parable with which he entertains his pupils in the Symposium, likewise lies at the heart of love itself. Love itself is likewise characterized by its dual nature of both flying towards and fleeing from its beloved.

This posture of the solitary, then, which can be considered the true theme of Musicamorosa, comes at least halfway to attaining what is classically termed ‘true love’.

Mark Pauwen

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