December 2024

The next in Die Stadt's Jackman/Organum series, continuing his persuit of the monolithic shifting structure.

Review by Frans De Waard, Vital Weekly : Music and musical releases can be controversial for many reasons. Lyrical content, shocking covers, too loud, too quiet: David Jackman’s music is controversial for none of these reasons. His music isn’t noisy or silent, with no lyrical content or a shocking cover. I am not on any discussion group online and never was, but I can imagine a discussion with the topic: “Is David Jackman doing the same thing over and over again?”. I don’t know the answer, but I can guess. We can say the last few releases (and I am discounting his Organum Electronics releases; they are in a different league) contain the same musical elements. I copy from my last review, “A drone, Shruti-like, some low gong sound, the occasional bang on the piano, a church bell and some crows flying overhead”. The crows may have flown away, but the other elements are there. I also wrote, “The drone is continuous here; the others appear irregularly. The whole work is slow and majestic. The music has a funeral aspect, like a black-and-white picture from an Edgar Allen Poe story. It is very similar to much of his recent work, and it is hard to figure out the difference(s). All of this fits my pop-art theory. I love this mystique and playing around with similar ideas and notions. I am sure this mystery will never be unravelled”

On ‘Shining’ (is that a word? Google pushes forward ‘The Shining’), we have two of these works, and they are different, more than just the numbers 1 and 2 on the discs. On the second disc, the intervals appear quicker, and the disc is a few seconds shorter. Both pieces feel like a requiem mass in a church, complete with those church bells. And why is this one credited to David Philip Jackman? More mystery or willful obscure?