Infos

Tracklist

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Text from the booklet

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Release Party Berlin    September 3, 2008

Reviews

Errata

Unfortunately there are some corrections on the inside of the CD Cover:
3. paragraph - instead of 'the rotation of planets' it should read:
    'the rotation or the revolution of planets'
5. paragraph - instead of 'Ur-Töne (original tones)' it should read:
    'Ur-Töne (primordial tones)'

Three artists are involved in Morphon: B. Ashra, Tommelon and Eru, so once again Olke and Wölke and Ricky Deadking alias Alexander Rues. It's hard to believe, but here you are dealing with two guitarists and a theremin player. And three electronic musicians, of course. With these means, the trio first generates a sound meditation based on the "Om" sound, which is assigned to both the heart and the tropical earth year with a frequency of exactly 136.1 vibrations per second.

But before there is a heartbeat at all, more than eleven minutes pass, during which the trio shifts to surfaces and changing pitches with crackles and snaps. These beats, in turn, are not classical dance floor beats, but rather an electronic plucking that varies in pitch, which lies above a kind of mechanical shock breathing and only makes the listener's head nod gently and deliberately. The beat in the second half of the track, on the other hand, seems faster, but has the gentleness of water droplets. Until almost industrial-like sounds and chirps join in and put the relaxation behind in favor of increased attention.

As planetary as the titles are, it is also about people, because not only do the human heart and the earth year coincide, but Mars and Venus are also assigned sexes. Accordingly, the tracks "Mars" and "Venus" are based on characters other than "Om": The male track surprises with comparatively hard bass sounds that penetrate the spheres and merge into something synthetic-technoid based on the braked Kraftwerk model, the female track is any Hardness taken again, instead analogue warmth enters the sound, mixed with cosmic synth tones, a soft background noise as well as refined effects, including piano and violin tones that are lost in space. Even if the trio sees relaxation and meditation as the reason for this album, the urgent recommendation is to listen to these three tracks with awareness - there is a lot to discover and experience.

Matthias von Bosenick for Kraut Nick Magazin 02-2021(only in german)

klangwirkstoff.de

bandcamp

Planetware

Ultimae (France / World)

Syntropia

silenzio.de  (distribution)

Klangkurier  (Switzerland)

soleilnoir

CD baby  (USA)

  Record Store Berlin

digital:

junodownload

bandcamp

Record Store Berlin

After the great two-discs compilation called "Active Agent Of Sound" from 2007, the German label Klangwirkstoff Records has released its first album of one project, and at the same time the second compact release in its whole history. (Consciously I am forgetting about, in fact, Klangwirkstoff debut, but digital, album of Brain Entertainment Laboratory from 2006). That project is Morphon which line-up makes three artists under pseudonyms: Eru (aka Ricky Deadking), Tommelon (Tom Wolke) and B. Ashra (Bert Olke). Tom Wolke and Bert Olke are also the owners of Klangwirkstoff. On mentioned "Active Agent Of Sound", Morphon has been responsible for a composition titled "Chronos". It was a perfect ambient production, full of beautiful harmony and incredibly evocative vision.

Their music as a creation of idea

The debut Morphon CD was released in aesthetic digipack, one year later after the compilation. After unpacking/opening it we have two wings in which centre contain the disc with music, while on those wings there is - in English and German languages - a text by Hans Cousto and Toma Wolke. It's a very intriguing supplement to music. Theory description of aim, message, vision. We find out for example that these musicians are "exploring artistically the mental and physical effects of natural vibrations and rhythms". It's taking us to that main Klangwirkstoff philosophy, which is an attempt to reproduce deeply the tempo of cosmos' life: to have it as the bridge to human organism; to make it as the unity in the end. To have that kind of situation, when the sound is influencing human's psyche and physics in an absolutely subtle way. The album cover explicitly presents musical perspective. The album title - "Om Mars Venus" - says actually everything. The Earth, Mars, Venus - three objects, which natural physics, enigmatic "planet tones", have decided this German group to deliver to the audio dimension.

Calibration of perception

Always. Always when a pure music, that human art, is additionally interpreted with resources such as those ideas, messages, thoughts, mathematical algorithms, then its value is never either more deep or more described. Music says everything. Just after listening to such a music, or in the phase of listening to such a music, we can relate ourselves to that addition surrealistic chapter wroten by the creator/creators. If this is a music about love, if this is a music about an autumn, if this is a music about anything else - if music by oneself don't answer on the question what it is all about, then all addition interpretation are worth nothing. But in the situation, when musical colour is entailing in psyche and physics, mind and heart that everything, about what those addition interpretation is, when you feel in your own, that musical tones are directing you, then that's the answer. Great result of cosmic algorithm. The art.

A bit of truth from one of the planet Earth beings

Artists from Morphon project knows well, what is a psychedelic journey. They know, because they capable this state, that philosophy of making and creating, implement into a musical life. In the end, this album is a lone journey through expansions of infinite depth, where emotions are blurred, hard to perceptible, somewhere there existing among the darkness patches, in pitch-blackness. The blackness - what an important thing it is here! The blackness isn't a base colour of the world for our eyes. Blackness is night, and in the night we sleep. We turn off the consciousness, we turn off the emotions. Our human emotions becomes neutral - as much neutral, as we less remember from our dreams. We live, we are going to sleep, we wake up, we live. The blackness is a signal to sleep. But the same blackness is a base colour of the universe for our eyes. Outside our world, the Earth, the blackness is a something fundamental. And solid. The blackness is the only one certainty and solidity in the universe. Everything what we have on its background, are variables, relative, moving objects. What all of this has a connection with "Om Mars Venus"? That have an ideal connection. That blackness, the only one certainty and solidity, is a performance here: form and content, secret trance. In different intensity, always in the background, there is a continuous motive, which we hear, which we feel more than we hear to tell you the truth, just sometimes we direct our consciousness to this element. It's a situation like with a sky in the night. When we look at the sky, we search for something, something what will admire us, what will catch the eye. In this searching from time to time we realize that actually we are all the time watching that blackness.

Reaching the infinity

With this album is a situation like as it is with every complete psychedelic journey with the cosmos theme, if we are on the Earth and we are staring at cosmos, then we can use our usual eyes and be happy while seeing standard view of the Moon or constellations. But also we can use a telescope and then the cosmos depth has no end. Everything depends on the telescope's power. In this music, the telescope's power used by us depends solely on us. How we will be prepared, such a journey we will experience. The level of our preparation is proportionally the power of that telescope. And in opposite to a real telescope - this thing has its own limitation, we and our always totally subjective and totally personal telescope doesn't contain it.

Prologue

When a twilight fell and night is rising,
Wake up and welcome us the cosmos as well,
With a friendship, force its way through the atmosphere
And come to the room and our eyes blackness.

The cosmos come more closely to us,
But isn't directly making a speech to us.
From our human consciousness
Into consciousness of meeting with the cosmos we're going,
When just "Om Mars Venus" we involve...

........

Epilogue

There's no these weird feelings already.
The music ended, while silence is.
You're thinking about taking off the headphones.
You're searching for some thoughts, but a sadness come.

Something has ended,
While a sleep invites you.
No, because you don't want to sleep. That's just an illusion.
So it's existing here anyway?... You're taking off the headphones.
You stand up, come to a window...

This album, its music, sound, is a masterpiece because of - and to what I never had any doubts - being a unity with a person that is listening to/feeling it, because it's psychedelically amorphic. The pictures are fading in, fading out, fading in, fading out, because they are coming to another ones. Sometimes, when we listen to music in the night, then from a real world, full consciousness, controlling thoughts, whenever we want it or not, we will go into such a harmony with the music, that music will heaving, swimming with its monotony through our owns. In this specific matter, Morphon has created simultaneously three compositions, that are perfectly adjusted to human harmony. I and the experiment done on myself is a real proof for a support of their theoretical aims, sentences about planet tones. This music relax deeply and transfer to a sphere, where all the time morphed motives are creating the same, but they are calling oneself, and dodging between their selves, swinging - in the end they swing us. There can be an impression at the beginning, that this music is not changing, that still has the same colour - especially, that there is a very low elements of standard music, because even as an ambient the album is very ambient. But the sound after listening to, again attract us. And is addicting. From one side we know the entire album after many listenings, but there is still that multidimensionalism, what causes that another journey can discover something new... Words are unable to reflect music - what a simple, banal and true sentence it is especially in case so marvellous as "Om Mars Venus" album, created by hugely great artists of Morphon project.

RB, Oktober 2008   psybient.net

My personal favourite from Klangwirkstoff - deep & low cosmic ambient with unquiet touches and a great sense of static vastness; more organic and less predictable than Inade, maybe more like a 'passive' version of Zoät-Aon psychoactive soundscapes...

soleilnoir