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BESTIA CENTAURI: Ubbo Sathla Release year: 2002 Format: MCD-R Tracklist: 1: The Catacombs of Ptolemais 08:33 Total playingtime: 31.19 min General Facts: Ubbo Sathla is Bestia Centauri's debut and it comes in the shape of a CD-R EP consisting of 3 tracks of electronical tension. Review: This was the first time I ever heard the works of this composer and Ubbo-Sathla left me with a quite positive impression in general. I didn’t enjoy this at all the first time I heard it but it became much more interesting when I started to become aware of the structure in these compositions and a tense structure it surely is. The music mainly consists of sounds which remind me of vibrating metalpoles and gigantic magnetic fields along with sampled sounds. It can be placed somewhere between ringing electronic music and dark ambient a’la Lustmord. It’s also interesting that eventhough Ubbo-Sathla was quite annoying during the first concentrated listens, the music soon started falling away but whenever I rediscovered it, it’s felt much better than before. This ought to say something about the way one should approach this music. If I were to point out any real negative aspects of this release, then it would be that I think the samples are a bit to high and they doesn’t really go well with the music the way they are mixed. The samples doesn’t always blend well into the flowing turbulence in the background and this problem is more or less evident in all tracks. Yet some of the more alien sampled are really nice, for example the one which occurs about 11 minutes into the second track. Like a gigantic cosmic vortex this is, not for the weakminded. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Five questions to Bestia Centauri: ECTONAUT: Please introduce Bestia Centauri to our readers. What is Bestia Centauri all about? For how long have you been doing this and for what reason? BESTIA CENTAURI: The public face of Bestia Centauri is a solo electronic music project that I initiated in 1999. By "electronic music", I simply mean electronically produced music that utilizes modern sound synthesis algorithms. My work has nothing to do with the contemporary rave or dance music to which the label “electronic music” is often misapplied. There are other elements of this project, as well, but they are too personal to speak of at present. The curious reader can get an inkling of these other aspects of Bestia Centauri from the brief and slightly (but only slightly) tongue-in-cheek description of the project posted at the Somnambulant Corpse website. As for my motivation, I do what I do purely as a source of pleasure and inspiration, and, more specifically, to create music that I would enjoy hearing but have not found elsewhere. ECTONAUT: Tell us something about the tracks on Ubbo-Sathla. Did you work with specific methods when you composed them? Is there a concept behind this release or anything else interesting that you think we should know about Ubbo-Sathla? BC: The name of the title track derives from a short story by Clark Ashton Smith. Ubbo-Sathla is an interstellar entity who spawns “the grisly prototypes of terrene life", and to whom all such life must eventually return. The Night Land II is inspired by William Hope Hodgson's novel of (almost) the same name. The Catacombs of Ptolemais is a phrase from Poe's prose poem "Shadow--A Parable". I intend to wean myself of over-reliance on literary references in the future, but these themes well illustrate various aspects of the "cosmicist" element that Bestia Centauri both represents and embodies. The aim is to create a sense of the numinous, the horrific, and the extra-human. As for my methods, I work intuitively and spontaneously--at least, as much as software-based synthesis allows--but I do make a conscious effort to use a variety of tools and to make certain that the music possesses a certain flow. As Chris Franke once said, speaking of the music of early Tangerine Dream (I paraphrase), "Sometimes it's a trickle, sometimes it's a waterfall, but the music always flows". I also take care to use, as much and as best I can, the sophisticated software employed more often in "pure" computer music or electro-acoustic music. The use of such tools has been the exclusive province of tediously intellectual academic composers or Post-Modern ironists for far too long. BC: Apart from the general rubric of electronic music, I do not think that the sounds of Bestia Centauri fit into any genre. If pressed, though, I would say that my music falls somewhere between non-rhythmic dark ambient "soundscapes" and electro-acoustic music, with a slight bias toward one or the other in a given piece. Offhand, I cannot think of too many projects like my own, although Lustmord, in Heresy and The Place Where the Black Stars Hang, seems to evince similar aesthetic and philosophical or spiritual concerns. Although what I am doing is rather different, the early music of Tangerine Dream (circa 1972-1975) has been a tremendous source of inspiration to me, as are certain of the works of the composer Gyorgy Ligeti (Atmospheres; Lux Aeterna; Lontano). Among much older works of electro-acoustic or tape music, I'm very fond of the music of Tod Dockstader and Myron Schaeffer's soundtrack to the film The Mask. As for more recent projects, of course, there's much that I haven't heard, but I've been most impressed so far by the work of Chaos As Shelter. Robert Scott Thompson is a contemporary composer of ambient and electro-acoustic music whose work I admire. ECTONAUT: What is most important in music according to you? How do you define quality music? What are your musical influences? BC: I've answered the question about sources of inspiration (I prefer this term to the word "influences") above. What is most important to me in music, as well as in anything else, is that it convey a sense of something poetic, imaginative, cosmic, Lovecraftian, and utterly beyond the human. "Quality music" to me is most likely to arise when the musician creates it out of a sense of inner necessity relating to the music itself, and not out of the usual social or egotistical motivations: that sort of, "Hey, look at me" mentality that is so prevalent everywhere today, but especially in the United States. I would certainly continue to do what I am doing whether there were any prospects for my music's release or not. ECTONAUT: What plans do you have for the future? Are there any new Bestia Centauri releases planned? Anything else you would like to add? BC: I plan to work at my own pace for as long as it gives me pleasure to do so, and to pursue the impossible goal of eventually replicating in spirit "the music of Erich Zann"! A piece entitled The Night Land will appear, I hope, within the next couple of months on an Afe Records compilation entitled No Abiding Places. Another, as yet-untitled, work will appear on a forthcoming Somnambulant Corpse compilation tribute to H.P. Lovecraft entitled The Outsider. There may also be a full-length release later this year. |
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