{"id":107329,"date":"2021-03-09T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2021-03-09T17:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toiletovhell.com\/?p=107329"},"modified":"2021-03-09T09:34:55","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T15:34:55","slug":"incommensurate-elements-voids-dreams-of-a-painted-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toiletovhell.com\/incommensurate-elements-voids-dreams-of-a-painted-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Incommensurate Elements: Void’s Dreams of a Painted World<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Let’s spill some ink over the “inky blackness” of our “memories of other worlds.”<\/p>\n

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Dreams of a Painted World<\/em>, released by the solo project Void<\/strong> at the beginning of 2021, is a palette of different styles brushed and smeared together. Black metal, post-rock, ambient, and funeral doom sometimes coalesce and other times diverge but never feel haphazardly enjoined. I have spent more time with this record than many others over the last three weeks, always a bit unsure of what keeps drawing me back for another listen. Yet Dreams of a Painted World <\/em>is not a befuddling modernist masterpiece that splits viewers into two disparate intellectual camps of either \u201cI understand it!\u201d or \u201cI don’t<\/em> understand it!\u201d Rather, Dreams of a Painted World<\/em> is akin to a Rothko; squares and rectangles of solid colours dissolving into one another at their boundaries might arrest you and hold you enrapt in the feelings it draws from you in an almost unmediated way. Or, like a Rothko, it might leave you unmoved.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking of Rothko because Void seems to compose its songs in a similar fashion. Recognizable, understandable spans of black metal abruptly stop before a post-rock passage begins. Other times, the two sounds are as indistinguishable as the borders between Rothko\u2019s yellows and oranges where you can no longer tell where one colour begins and the other ends. Dreams of a Painted World<\/em> also calls to mind Jana Larson\u2019s recently published Reel Bay<\/em>. Subtitled \u201ca cinematic essay,\u201d Larson\u2019s book is fiction, non-fiction, and autobiography; it is about a film Larson had not yet made and then finally made but still remains unmade in the book; it is a true story in the sense that Fargo<\/em>, a film that sits at the book\u2019s center, is a true story. It is also a far truer story than Fargo<\/em> while still very much being a collage of truth, invention, imagination, and reality. Textually, it frequently breaks between normal typeset paragraphs and film script. These changes often happen seemingly at random, without a sense of the difference between the film script being re-written, the facts of the case surrounding Takako Konishi\u2019s mysterious death, and Larson\u2019s lightly fictionalized memoir. Really, like that magical space in a Rothko, there is no telling the difference.<\/p>\n