Reviews

January 2011

A World Of Sounds

(excerpts from 10-page feature, translated from Spanish)

“… the music of Robert Weis (USA, 1958)… will wrap you in an invisible shape until you are caught in a cloud of sound.

“Upon first listen, of least importance is the origin of the sounds, because when the music invades you, the conscious mind becomes held in a type of lethargy (almost in a trance) allowing the subconscious mind to dominate.  Then, the body becomes light and everything around you fades and loses presence; you exist alone in the “now,” and in a moment it is “yesterday” and “tomorrow.”  It produces a fusion of dimensions of space, both near and far.

“It produces a strange effect: even with one’s eyes open, it allows us to see within ourselves, diving into the pages of our memories, without nostalgia, and in turn, it makes us enter the moments of life – but without longing for what has been lived.  The present invades us.

“Afterward, when one has finished the first listen, the conscious mind (curious for realism), begins to distinguish rhythmic patterns, formalities, timbres… and the mind discovers familiar elements of a plot that one had first perceived as totally alien from the everyday and known.  In this second phase, intellectual enjoyment allows one to approximate the task of the composer, his work – meticulous and thorough – as a craftsman, because he knows the sounds and tools of his work; as an investigator, because he reveals new timbral possibilities in the sound of elements from the environment and gives them a musical category previously unknown to us; as a communicator, for transmitting and sharing a way of seeing and feeling the world around him; as an artist, because he combines and manipulates the power of sounds to create compositions that are pleasing to the ear.  And, although at first his sonorities seem strange and alien to our reality, in the end we recognize them as part of our world.

“To see reality from another perspective – as Weis does – is a way to discover another side to sounds, to get to know them, the ones that we ignore or, conversely, despise because they annoy us.

“Weis works the raw material of music (sound) in its pure state, without any pejorative valuation beforehand, in a kind of vindication of the artistic possibilities of noise, because acoustic exploration is fundamental to his work.”

Revista Prodiemus (Spain), Special Edition 2011 “Paisajes Sonoros”

Original Spanish feature (pages 27 to 36):
http://issuu.com/revista.prodiemus/docs/revista2011

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