The astounding Almark Thaolen shared with me a blast from his past: a 2013, tribute album to Michael Radford's cinematic interpretation of George Orwell's prognostic novel, Nineteen-Eighty Four/1984.
Almark combines all the right ingredients to make this four-part masterpiece click, including actual dialogue from the movie (pasted and rolled like a William S. Burrough's cut-up), sandwiched and smashed with rocketbombed reverberations and ample, ambient brackets. To all delicate and cautious ears, the album will epitomize Orwell's threat to the ingenious, subliminal tee!
The album builds an air of fear (as it should), but there's still a soothing shuffling to it all, where pain becomes pleasure and fiction, fact. It's a propagandized process that represents Winston and Julia's resistance and collapse, and as one listens, such comes to prophesize one's own.
Part 1: "Hate the Enemies" creates a startling, wake-up call, invoking the feel of being caught and dragged off for every thoughtcrime. It's also a track in which Almark gets devilish delight unspooling his interlocking, industrial gloom, as the selection slithers and crawls to perpetuate Orwell's dualities. What's up is down, but only for the moment. Today's friend may be tomorrow's foe.
Part 2: "Big Brother is Watching" is pure, looping paranoia. The eye is upon one, staring without acquittal in a circle of infinite rote. In this instance, Almark creates a doublethinking mood that darts the listener from proletarian station to imprisoned disgrace, without any hope to appease, let alone any chance to breathe.
Part 3: "The war continues" sows the Ministry of Truth's lies. War is over, even as it begins. Who is the antagonist? Is it you, me, him, her ... or maybe, just maybe, treacherous Emmanuel Goldstein, transmitting from some densely populated area of Eurasia, Eastasia or even Oceania? Of course, it's impossible to know, and so the radio-controlled tremors become faintly bird-chirped, persuading one to settle down and just go with the hypocritical flow.
Part 4: "The bleak existence of Totalitarian thought and deed" is the album's most hypnotic, brainwashed sample: a candy that's so sour that it tastes sweet. It's Winston's piteous hymn after he's been sequestered to Rm 101 and broken by the rats ... a numbing, machine-punched refrain of obedience, set in an unlocked cell where one shouts to the world an unconditional love for Big Brother.
Almark's tribute thrives on the same, plaintive level as Dominic Muldowney's soundtrack, the Eurythmics accompanying impressions of such, David Bowie's titular single and the Alan Parson Band's cloaked Eye in the Sky. It crashes down upon one's mind with a proclamation that requests reenactment. After all, when reminded of the loss of freedom, one warning (one listen) isn't enough.
Listen (and comply) at
https://synthoelectro.bandcamp.com/album/the-nineteen-eighty-four-show-1222013?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1EF90oAbkbGSBzmcH1udld1-GwUBj7FgkeVKpwY0Q4sqGZywNklN6E7U0_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw
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