As an American, it is a rare treat when you come across a project like aMute; a seamless amalgamation of genre and inspiration that possesses an effortless experimental potential while remaining lavishly contemplative. I feel like Europeans get to enjoy stuff like this all the time. Here in the States, the closest we get to grandiose electronic-folk hybrids is tUnE-yArDs, which, if we're being honest, just feels like the musical equivalent of David's Bridal or cable TV at this point- overly expensive and mid-market Boomer luxuries that most of us can do without. Who aMute reminds me most of though, is THOT; even if they don't share that much in common sonically, they have the same preference for building a dense and brooding atmosphere in which their chimeric music can sprawl out and make the most of its ill-tempered ways. While I think you could spend an awful lot of time breaking down the aMute's specific influences, and if you wrote the project's architect Jérôme Deuson, I'm sure he'd be happy to unpack each song for you at length in terms of what he was attempting to accomplish and why... I feel such efforts are misdirected. The real value of an album like Days of Light & Let Go (the group's eighth) is only intelligible from your subjective experience of it as a secluded sonic antechamber of reverie. It's really not party music. It's something that you have to make sense of on your own and in your own way. Days of Light opens its channels to you with a poem about lost souls trapped in dissonant wondering while reaching for illusory glory, a scene that plays out over exceedingly overdriven waves of feedback and windswept textures, sounding like Randy Warthog of the Residents returning with a message from beyond the grave and confronting you while you're attempting to take shelter from an incoming tornado. The following track, "Let Go," resembles a drum machine programmed by a sentient clump of moss attempting to interpret some ancient text to a deaf animist spirit imprisoned in the side of a cliff that resembles the stoic profile of some long-forgotten chieftain. The resonating orchestral oscillations of "Every Little Sad Moments We Had" pleasantly goss and ostentatiously ordain a series of transitions with an obscure spiritual force like the indigenous music of a band of techno-future scavengers who live in and maintain a server farm out in the Arizona desert centuries after the world outside has gone dark and backslid into a period of medievalist regression. Even though I said that attempting to unpack aMute's influences is likely against the grain of best practices in appreciating the album, I have to say that the half-whispered and lamenting intonations, as well as the volatile architecture and openly hostile hip-hop elements of "These Crazy Crazy Dreams" really come across as the best possible expression of a potential Radiohead and clipping. collaboration, if such a thing were ever possible. While much of the monumental ambient tones and futuristic folk of Days of Light have a distinctly depressive vibe to them, I get the impression from the esteemable calm and sure-sighted approach of the closing acoustic track "Aurevoir L'Orage," that Jérôme believes that, despite whatever dark passageways you might run down while wandering the labyrinth of the mind, it is possible, and even necessary, to find yourself under the spotlight-like gaze of epiphany, a mental miracle luminescent enough to light your way back to a point of clarity. At least that's my reading. Results may vary, but the likelihood of Days of Light & Let Go making some kind of an impact on you is a near certainty.
