Massergy: Fire Opal
Spotted Peccary
A few details worth knowing before giving attention to the musical content of Massergy's Spotted Peccary debut, Fire Opal. First, Chicago-born and Austin, Texas-based Eric Jensen created the material to honour the memory of his brother Adam, a young electronic musician killed in a car accident in 2002. Secondly, Eric, a self-taught synth programmer and ambient composer, performed, recorded, and mixed the album's seven tracks outdoors at night sans sequencers, loops, software, or plugins; a computer was used but merely as a recording device to capture the performances. With no post-recording editing applied, the pieces sound exactly as they did when first brought into being. And, yes, you read that correctly: his studio is not only outdoors but located in a small, elevated balcony within a nature preserve that's also home to coyotes, owls, deer, and other animals.
Though Jensen is, as mentioned, self-taught, he isn't without experience: he spent years developing his abilities as a programmer and composer before determining his Massergy material was ready for public consumption. Its title inspired by the fire opal associated with Mexican folklore and that has to do with powers of healing and protection, Fire Opal presents immersive soundscapes birthed in real-time using guitars, synths, and electronics as sound generators. The music's tranquility, delicate sparkle, and incandescent shimmer evoke the magical, mist-covered stillness of nighttime, when every glimpsed movement in the shadows suggests the emergence of an otherwise unseen life-form.
A soothing pastoral ambiance is instated early when acoustic guitar picking emerges alongside enveloping synth textures in “Vinesong,” the three-minute setting functioning as an ostensible overture. The first of four long-form tracks, “The Shepherdess” sets sail using rapid, guitar-sourced patterns as a metronomic foundation over which Jensen drapes radiant washes. That propulsive dimension recedes, however, to be substituted by a meditative New Age-styled episode that itself evolves into an explorative guitar-focused improvisation, Jensen's bass and guitar parts drenched in a dense, intoxicating swirl of ambient treatments. With acoustic guitar strums and organ chords part of the arrangement, the album's pastoral folk character reemerges in “El Viajero,” even if radiant synth washes and angelic voice accents also appear.
At eighteen minutes, “Cold White Smoke” is the lengthiest of the journeys and is, not surprisingly, episodic. Transitions are effected smoothly, however, and consequently impressions of flow and forward motion are upheld throughout a scenic trip whose gentle percolations induce serenity and entrancement. Almost as long, the dramatic title track, a deep ambient meditation, exemplifies characteristics emblematic of New Age but is darker in tone than material normally associated with the genre; yet while the soundscape's icy sonorities initially point it in a chilly space ambient direction, a shift in temperature and mood transpires during the second half that sees harmonious and quietly uplifting sides move to the fore.
One of the more appealing aspects of the recording is that, though it doesn't lack for polish, it never loses its human dimension; stated otherwise, Fire Opal plays like it was created by a human being as opposed to machines. Consistent with that, an inner sleeve note clarifying that “subtle imperfections in sound have been retained” enhances the project's appeal. The longer pieces in particular impart a vivid sense of real-time creation when the listener is made to feel as if Jensen is but an arm's length away as his material is given physical form.May 2019