When we speak of an album as “ambitious”, we might mean different things — perhaps as little as a band simply trying to do something they’ve never attempted before, or perhaps as momentous as when a group reaches toward high levels of songwriting extravagance and performance intensity that, if successful, could leave listeners shaken or spellbound, or mentally and emotionally altered, to a degree that more commonplace achievements don’t achieve. On their new album Cosmogenie, Dysylumn’s ambitions are of the latter kind, but don’t stop there.
The album is also a massive work, extending in length to an hour and a half. And conceptually it spans three separate-yet-unified chapters, each one with its own cover art, with subjects that include (to quote from press materials for the album) “the creation of everything from nothing, in the immensity of emptiness; the formation of the primordial chaos, forming little by little the concretization of the elements; and these same elements that disperse in an infinite space until their extinction.” And thus the three chapters in the album are respectively named Apparition, Dispersion, and Extinction.
Of course, ambitions are merely goals. The loftier the ambitions, the greater the difficulty in achieving them and the higher the risk of failure. In the case of music, the test of success is in the listening. What we have for you today is a part of that test for Dysylumn, a premiere of the second Part of Cosmogenie’s second chapter, “Dispersion“, in advance of the album’s release on October 9th by Signal Rex. Continue reading »
