In the Neighbourhood of the Dying Star Album

Lithuanian composer/producer Martin Rach offers us a piece in two movements which fuses the timbres of traditional orchestral instruments with electronic noise, sometimes pretty harsh. Full of clashing styles, yet always intensely emotional, this is truly contemporary music that proves that collage and pastiche do not always have to be ironic in order to succeed aesthetically.When you only read about it, the idea of combining noise with sometimes even film-scorey tonal composition may sound like a cheap attempt at taking the edge off noise, making it “arty” and palatable for a mainstream audience. But the opposite is true of this music. As the title suggests, it sounds serious about its endorsed subject of entropy and terminal despair, and the noise is used along with instrumental tours de force to drive this point home all the more emphatically. Thanks to Martin Rach’s maximalist rather than minimalist strategy, the audible result is beautiful rather than bleak.