Cyparissus: faun


Have you ever gone out to a movie with friends, and one of your asshole friends says, “Yeah it was good…but the book was so much better!” Usually they say that just to gain brownie points among his/her friends to show how “They’re the intellectual of the group.” It’s annoying yeah, but it does contain some valid points.

The reason the book is always better than the movie, is because the book allows for your own imagination to play out the story. You breathe life into each page you read, you create the world the characters inhabit, and the author merely provides the plot.

I say all of this in review of this album, because Cyparissus’ faun does the exact same thing but with music. Cyparissus creates a sonic playground for your mind to wonder and play in. It’s an album to sit down after a long day of work, and to work on that novel you’ve always dreamed on writing. You can’t just listen to one song, like how you can’t have Harry Potter just be about a kid with a thunderbolt scar on his forehead. This is an album that creates a world and atmosphere and that you must sit down and listen to all the way through.

deer’s face in front of portal, to the wind is the poison of the grass really sets the stage and the tone for the rest of the album. It’s a desolate and lonely sound. It’s a cloudy, windy, cold, rainy day, and you’re soaked to the skin. The pulsating pads and piercing ambient noises makes you feel like you’re the only person on earth.

The whole album really feels like the soundtrack to some Scandinavian film that has never been made. Ingmar Bergman’s films as far as I can recall, never really had a soundtrack (or if his did they usually were instruments that were played on scene, I can’t remember). But if his films did have a soundtrack it would be this album.

By the time the album reaches tick your mind begins to play tricks on you. There’s a condition called, musical ear syndrome. Where essentially you hear music in places where there isn’t any music, for example you hear the A/C and you start hearing an orchestra. I first thought I was imagining things, and then I jrealized that this track has such subtle sounds that on repeat listen, you can hear the subtle changes in pitches and tones. It takes a really delicate hand to be able to craft something so nuanced, and subtle. That and the overall semi lo-fi experience of the track creates a unique sound that I haven’t heard done that well in awhile.

bloodtype introduces such a change in tone, that instead of a wall of sound it feels more like a waterfall of sound. It stands out not for the fact it’s loud–quite the contrary–it’s actually not that loud at all, it’s that the rest of the album is just so quiet. A juxtaposition like that always highlights that which preceded it. In this case the quietness of the album before really highlights the introspection, and the introspection that as a result created that imaginary playground for you to play in.

Next up we have the longest, and shortest tracks. gelid which means icy cold, and colorplate. Both of these tracks take on a lot more sinister of a quality. Where before the album sounded isolated, introspective, and lonely; this part of the album feels like an invasion of that loneliness. As though you were alone for a very long time and finally allowed someone into your life, only for them to fuck you over and betray you. Which begs the question to a creative person: is it worth allowing other people into your the world you’ve created? Which is a question which kind of gets addressed in the last two songs.

The last two songs song dytikos and hold you like a sepulchre answers these questions. dytikos begins with a drum, the type of drum that’s in any movie signifying the call to action. It maintains the sinister quality of the prior tracks, and with it’s call to action doesn’t bode well, and we get hints of what kind of action that is required with this track in hold you like a selpulchre; selpulchre being, “a small room or monument, cut in rock or built of stone, in which a dead person is laid or buried.” And with it’s sad melancholy sound ends in a mysterious note. The album ends with that type of ending that in a movie, would make people pour over each frame trying to figure out the “true ending” and to not be left on a cliffhanger. And to the question of, whether it’s worth allowing other people into our own world we’ve created, it’s something that you’ll have to figure out for yourself. For we couldn’t ask ourselves these types of questions if Cyparissus didn’t invite us into their world, but at the same time, the album leaves us hanging wanting for more.

For an album, an imaginative playground, and overall world to inhabit. I give this album my recc



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