OMG, Benjamin Mauch gets me, I mean GETS ME gets me, like we were separated at birth or some surreal junk like that. Before I get into how good "Discorporeal" is, let me just say how much I enjoy reading, like really love reading, so much so that I've pretty much made a career out of it. So when I see a musician as into reading as I am, I have to be like, you and me, dude. We get it. We know. That's how I felt when I caught a gander at this nugget of promo copy:
"This album was born out of a desire to write down a reflection of my love for speculative fiction and its role in my life. Reading books that involve landscapes or times that are completely unique yet similar to our own (which sf excels at) has been a source of solace ... I treasure the moments I have spent on other worlds, in future times, and on ships whose destinations seem endless. 'Discorporeal' is my attempt to sew together what I have been dreaming for years, and turn those dreams into sound."
Basically I feel like when I'm writing about music, I'm letting my imagination wander through its own corridors. When I read, I'm ingesting nourishment for my imagination, energizing it, allowing it to make fantastical leaps or dream up entirely new scenarios, events, landscapes, vistas, interactions. I churn it out here, because my fingers don't play guitar so good anymore, and music is mostly an avenue for me to get fictiony with it. Benjamin Mauch's process is similar, except he regurgitates his inspiration through sound rather than text.
That's where "Discorporeal" comes in. It does indeed sound like Mauch's dreams made audible. And while synthesizer meditations are perfectly made for that kind of endeavor, Mauch has such an ear for the melodic and the tranquil that these tracks transcend the usual ambient fare. Yeah, I'll probably revert to some stock vocabulary - "drift," "envelop," "expanse," etc. - but you'll have to stick with me and get beyond that. Get so far beyond that, in fact, because what Mauch is doing is not meant for us on Earth - it's out there on some other world, obeying some other planet's laws of gravity and thermodynamics. I'm there with him taking it all in. You can be there too. What do you see? What's your experience?
--Ryan
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