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Lea Cummings
Revelations From The New Silence Volume II: The Scalar Temple

Album UK 2010 on Kovorox Sound label
Electronic (Noise)

THE SECOND VOLUME OF A SERIES OF RELEASES EXPLORING THE EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF MULTI-LAYERED TRANSENDENTAL FREQUENCES, ATMOSPHERICS AND REPETITION. FIVE TRACKS. TOTAL RUNNING TIME 42:22 "Lea Cummings is apparently best known for his work as Kylie Minoise, which causes me no small amount of cognitive dissonance: it is very hard to reconcile that the shirtless kamikaze noise terrorist that I have seen flailing around on the ground in YouTube videos is the same man that has made a near-perfect album of rather sacred-sounding drone. He must be very good at compartmentalizing the various facets of his personality. According to Cummings, this particular series of releases was created to explore “the emotional and physical effects of multi-layered transcendental frequencies, atmospherics, and repetition,” but that doesn’t quite do justice to what he has accomplished here. Nevertheless, it is an accurate and pretty matter-of-fact summation of the album’s actual mechanics: Lea endlessly and hypnotically repeats elegantly simple ideas, but those ideas are bolstered by many tracks of subtle hissing, pulsing, shimmering, and oscillating frequencies. It’s a pretty great trick and Cummings executes it brilliantly and with a surprising amount of variety. I especially loved the ghostly (and Blade Runner-inspired?) “Tanhauser’s Gate,” but the whole album is extremely strong. The only aberration is the closing piece, “The Final Knowledge,” which is a rather harsh and disquieting variation on the template established by the other four songs. It’s kind of brutal way to end such a mesmerizing album, but I suspect Cummings had thematic reasons for including it: the whole album feels like it could be a metaphor for a search for meaning and enlightenment, but “The Final Knowledge” seems to indicate that there isn’t any to be had. It’s certainly too bad that Lea has possibly discovered that the world is a horrifying, meaningless void, but at least the rest of us got a sublime and thoroughly engrossing album out of the experience. 8/10. " October 22, 2010 By Anthony D'Amico FOXY DIGITALIS

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