Review: Yume Bitsu - The Golden Vessyl of Sound

The Golden Vessyl of Sound is Yume Bitsu's fourth full-length album, following Auspicious Winds, Yume Bitsu, and giant surface music falling to earth like jewels from the sky. The album has no song titles, and I will be exploring the vinyl edition — two records labeled Y, U, M, E. Side E is a live recording and not included on the CD release (or this article). It just may be Yume Bitsu's best work to date...

Time, a curiosity to some, is a mere instrument of the old ones. And in a time far, far beyond the infinite past, yet one bridging this present and that future, the realms were much different. In some songs of the elders, it is told of how the Moth messengers of their distant place once were a great enemy. When the sound vessels were played by bent hand, the outer realms were a great distance, worlds unknown and feared. The sounds did not yet travel on the winds, and the air of the beyond was silent and clouded....

- The Moth Flames of Ruin and The City in the Sky. (Ancient Dryystonian tale)

Side Y

Song 1.

Slide into effect, like the start of a record. It is a record. A crisp wonderment of entangling horns, soft Dark Side-laden guitar picking, and a voice coming through it all, a good start. Meanwhile, scatter blurbles & gargles tickle for another layer of interaction, the bass guiding forward, outward, and anticipation....

We are

Everything in between the cracks. Even that which we are not.

We are

Singing, and raising our voices, layering them so that all can hear.

We are

The harbingers of this newness, stacked on from generations of otherness. Sonic reaches unyet spoken, but somehow intimated by masterful design, stretching as far as the static can allow. Ratios that do not even out; statistical improbabilities.

This is consciousness and it is one amazing fucking thing. So many aspects of the human soul and where is it to begin? Within artistic expression, within most Western narrative forms, a certain amount of fiction exists, to place the listener in a particular perspective for a duration. Many feel it is necessary to put the human in a form of context within the world. Authors of textual fiction utilize the device of character to do so. The character(s) then induce a plot, which is what the narrative is talking about.

In music, the task becomes something different, especially in mostly instrumental albums, like the Golden Vessyl of Sound. The device of character is taken by a combination of lead melodies, essentially characters taken on by particular instruments in the work. And then the familiar human voice, singing in English, speaking to a particular audience--attempting to communicate something that lies outside of the narrative itself.

Article Author: D. Taylor Singletary

Visit D. Taylor Singletary's author page — D. Taylor Singletary's Blog