Eitan Reiter - Places I miss that I haven't been to

Label: Aleph Zero Records

Catalog#: AlephZ15

Format: CD, Album, Partially Mixed

Country: Israel

Released: 31 May 2010

Tracklist:

1. Underwater

2. Choices

3. The way too...

           4. See What I See, Hear What I Hear

           5. Eggplant Week

          6. Friends

          7. Coffe

          8. Smile

          9.My Window

         10. Room Of Creation

         11. Just Another Night (part 2)

         12. Closure

That place really had a big impact on me, so many years have passed, but still I often think about it. The sun is heading towards it's nightly rest, giving away a piercing tone of yellow over the landscape, trees are rushing by, there are cottages littered among the vivid green fields, some manors as well, but they appear with longer intervals. Some horses wander around their relatively vast enclosures, an eagle swiftly and nobly flies through the air into the sun. It's a really fantastic pastoral view that is ever changing before my eyes, that sense of constantly arriving and constantly departing induces a sense of ease throughout my being. Despite this visual symphony that is going on in my field of vision I can only think of that place, I miss it, and as ever more beautiful panoramas are appearing before me, that sense of a place, somewhere, sometime, grows stronger, it feels so familiar. And I realize, it's a place I could call home, yet, baffling as it is, I've never been there, nor do I have any idea of where it is. Some say it's an inherit feeling of paradise, when we as humans lived easily on the grass lands of Africa, but maybe it's not a lost memory, maybe it's a longing, a feeling of travel to unknown whereabouts, maybe it's a destination. Or maybe, the destination, is the journey.

Eitan Reiter is an artist that is not afraid to make exactly the music he wants to. “Places I miss that I haven't been to”, is really not your typical downtempo album, if it is anything it is very unique, mysterious, genre crossing, experimental and daring. Daring because it is so vastly imaginative, original, and extremely varied. Just as when I was sitting on the train and the landscape was constantly changing into something new, Eitans music has that same characteristic, but yet there is still a coherent picture conveyed by the music, just as landscapes just don't go from dense lush forests into dry deserts over no stretch of land. The music varies from elevated, pristine, to modestly happy tones over to deep melancholic vistas and into mysterious unexplored psychedelic realms, this is an album that has a very wide emotional scope. But don't worry, you won't be thrusted into different emotional states, Eitans seems to have realized the dignity and importance of patience, letting the listener smoothly cross from one emotional realm to another.

I more than once find myself asking, “Can this really be called music?” Eitan is not composing complex music, but more sounds sewn together into a subtle sonic tapestry bordering between music and just sound. The varied character of the album mediates a strong incentive to keep a listener interested throughout the whole album, there really is no way in predicting what will be up next. Producing a varied album involves high stakes, the possibility to not excel increases relative to the degree of variedness in the album, and I can quite confidently say that Eitan does excel in every department he's managed to squeeze into this album. To bear in mind is that this is a very hard-digested album, it took a long time before I realized that this was actually a great album. So my recommendation is to give this album a lot of time, and if you already have been listening to this but never really got into it, give it another chance, you might be surprised.

Buy the album at Aleph Zero

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Contemplation

One thing that I think is a flaw with pshysicist ( I have of course great respect) is that the overall conesnsus seems to be that space and time and everything that makes it up is dead, lifeless, and yet somehow we manage to sit down a sunny afternnoon, gaze upon the sunset while Chopin Waltz no.7 in C minor is flowing out of the speakers, could there be anything more alive? It seems strange to presume that complexity at a certain level suddenly creates something that is alive, like us, animals or plants. I think string theory as I understand it is a beautiful theory, and I cannot help but think that strings are not just "blind force" vibrating in certain patterns creating elementary particles. One problem that is very apparent to me, when reading physics, is that you are always yourself pushing the goal one step further away from yourself. Before string theory, there was quantum mechanics, and as Brian Greene puts it, it cannot account for any explanation of why certain elementary particles have this or that mass, energy so forth and so on. Now with string theory, voilá! of course the characteristics of elementary particles are due to the vibrational pattern of the string! But then the question arises, why is the string vibrating in that particular manner? If you are to come up with more pshysicist explanations then there will always be one or more questions arising from the conclusions you manage to create. An easy answer is to say, well, of course the string is just another form of life, and it vibrates the way it does because it wants to, thus creating whole of the elegant universe we are living in, but of course it would be childish, insane even to attribute intentionality upon "dead matter". At least the chain of explanation stops lol :) I think,, that knowledge is like a fractal, every answer gives rise to one or more questions thus, there will be an infinite number of questions and the number of answers will relative to the amount of questions become zero, beacause the number of questions move faster towards infinity (this is sound mathematical reasoning). Most people would consider this to be the standpoint of a skeptic, why? Look at the Mandelbrot, every branch is a new set of questions, and you can zoom in indefinately and it will give rise to the most astonishing patterns, and there is no end to it, doens't this make the fact that there are no answers look beautiful? You can also make the analogy to reality, of course we can never speak about reality and non-reality, how would you know the difference, there is none. Reality is vibrations, the symphony of the universe, this is exactly what string theory says, on a phiilosophical level, and that is what makes the theory so apppealing.

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