Music of the Abstract: Nocturnal Fury by Satori

Sadly due to the work I needed to complete for the Halloween 31 For 31 season, I had to neglect the following series, more irritating as I promised a series of seasonally appropriate choices for the weeks covering October. Now that Halloween has finished, I can thankfully bring this back starting with a track I was originally going to bring up during the month. It's rare to catch a band or artist you've never heard of and fell swept away on first hearing, especially if you don't live in an environment where there's record stores and have to rely on the radio and its Top 40 tracks and songs. Even if they are good, you've heard songs on the many times before or had advance warning of the terrible ones. With Satori I have nothing in terms of context for them baring the album Nocturnal Fury comes from, Kanashibari (2008), and only some basic information, a British group that has existed since the late eighties and has fluctuated in the musicians it had since its creation. I merely heard an ominous mix of pure noise and sounds coming from the speakers of a second hand book and music store in Sheffield, and in a moment either of rashness or desire, asked to buy the CD that being played itself. I have no regrets and this would not be the only time I bought a CD from that store in the midst of it being played, causing one to wonder what the store owners kept thinking of me forcing them to have to switch albums for the rest of the day's work.

Ambient and electronic music which has no big beats is an area I've yet to even dip a toe into, not even the work of Brian Eno explored by me. It is both perfect background music, not a dismissive comment at all, but also can be fully immersed in. Listening to such hair raising electronic groans and screeches as in the chosen track in a music store pushes one into a certain heightened mood from the moment a track or whole album's worth of them start, and it's not surprising the album cover for Kanashibari is a replication of The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli. Itself a potent piece of art, the attempt to replicate such imagery in the darkened and ethereal music with the CD is done with commendable hard work.