Steven Severin - Maldoro (RE:)

Mr Severin's second release on his own label is the score to an experimental stage production of the surrealist tract, "Chants de Maldoror". That, in itself, means nothing to somebody like me, who is just listening to the CD, but it also makes this very hard to review. Music like this, that has a specific purpose, can seem somewhat ridiculous when taken out of the context of that purpose. Unlike his previous release, "Visions", which was made up of music for and inspired by the film "Visions of Ecstasy", this is the soundtrack of the stage production.

The first track, 'Prelude: Europa' is a perfect example of the problem, the seemingly endless repetition of the same sounds just gets boring, but on stage it probably has an incredible hypnotic effect. The rest of the CD isn't much better. Ambient noises and electro effects endlessly repeated, all merging into an undifferentiated mass of sounds. This isn't really music at all, most of the time it's not even melodic, this is atmospheric sounds. It was probably brilliant as one element of the stage production, but removed from that specific purposed, it's fairly pointless.

by Donnacha DeLong