Search - Carolyn Yarnell :: Sonic Vision

Transporting, haunting, unabashedly beautiful

Julia Dillon | san francisco | 10/05/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I find myself barely resisting the urge to launch into a diatribe about the compartmentalizing of music today.... because this CD crosses so many musical
-category lines it's mind-blowing.
On Sonic Vision, Carolyn Yarnell exhibits a compositional ability and, perhaps more importantly, an undeniable comfort and facility with musical genres so disparate it leaves me dumbfounded....
However.
In truth, I wouldn't care much about her technical range were it not for the fact that Sonic Vision not only presents a unified artistic vision, but is also a CD that is just absurdly beautiful--even spiritual-- and unabashedly so.Love God is driven by an implied funk rhythm that is realized only at the piece's end, when a straight-up irresistable techno-house beat manifests. Until then, a casio-ish synthesiser, piano, and solo voice seem to query the structure of this piece of music in which they find themselves. And it's an interesting chat they have.Apparently the newest piece--10/18, featuring a baroque flute with very 21st-century after-effects--recalls, well, perhaps a sephardic shepherd song--or maybe a coyote in the middle of the night--and so it's hard to resist the
conclusion that these tales are, much like Yarnell's choices of instrumentation, equal. These stories, as well as any image of Aloneness that may haunt or inspire a listener, speak of an existential loneliness that (apologies to
sartre, camus &c.) words cannot describe. We're all here together. And we're all alone. Does it matter when an instrument was made, if it "speaks" to the human soul?
I guess I don't think so.... certainly not anymore.I'm always amazed when an album title is true to the music it names. Sonic Vision certainly lives up to its promise of synesthesia.... And, in the spirit of that confused mingling of the senses, Yarnell's CD transports the listener to deserts, mountains, even tiny creeks within dark forests...Until a
track ended, i found that i hadn't even questioned the *fact* that i'd been smelling sage, seeing broad red sunset horizons, and hearing the rush of water over pebbles, all in my own living room."