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The Adept

by Bleie

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Susurrus 07:38
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Peradam 05:48
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The Unseen 06:20

about

Music is widely considered the most direct art form in its emotional immediacy. In music, we can approach emotionally complicated states (sadness, longing, darkness) which we might otherwise recoil from in everyday life. Catharsis is one of these complex emotional states, and is at the core of Bleie’s The Adept.

The Adept is a deeply personal work for Sarah Bly aka Bleie. These pieces were created as a cathartic burst and healing salve just after the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland which took the lives of dozens of our friends. Many in our circle experienced The Adept live, as we stepped out to gather together, after the tragedy occurred. To some, this music served as a way of releasing built-up tension, sadness, anger. Tears were shed, needed smiles of enjoyment were sparked.

Nevertheless, the work stands alone, independent of its history. Simply press play and listen. This is a sound universe with feels. Darkly beautiful environments are filled with deeply evolving tonal instruments, roiling percussion, hazy distortion and crisp sound design. Don’t forget the banging kickdrums. It was recorded in performance, live to stereo, and it has the heavy energy of live hardware-based techno. It also reaches a depth of feeling and textural complexity that sets it apart from simple genre exercises.

If you find this work inviting on a conceptual level, as we do, you may be interested in how it came to be. Sarah’s interests lean toward the esoteric; she points to transpersonal counseling psychology, alchemy, Sufism and the power of altered consciousness as particular influences. After the fire, many reckoned with notions of mortality, and reappraisal of our way of living and values. Sarah’s music grew from this process.

The Adept gets its title from the notion of an initiate student of a spiritual path: an Adept. It refers to the journey of being led from darkness into enlightenment. And into a new notion of mortality.

“Finally, the initiate desires to overcome death and to obtain the immortality in which the Adept firmly believes. Death to the Adept is a door into a higher and fuller life. We were not meant to live for all eternity in our present personality, but to evolve into a form more grand than we are yet capable of conceiving.” 

– Dr Claude Brodeur PhD

The music flows like storytelling. The narrative is present – not only in its musical structure but also in the song titles. The song titles – besides referring to the path of the adept in spiritual mysticism – are a purposely linear interpretation of steps in the alchemical process, indirectly echoing Joseph Campbell’s notion of the Hero’s Journey.

This is heady stuff, and there are rabbit-holes to dive into for those interested in these concepts. But first and foremost, this is heavy, gloriously weird, heartfelt, spooky techno that encourages careful listening in a multitude of environments.

In conclusion, Sarah’s own words on the subject. A verbal grenade, a burst of ideas for your consideration:

“If anyone listens with our [deceased] friends in mind, then the intent is for the album to be a healing salve, or maybe a map of how to begin to heal. For anyone else, it stands as a general invocation to go within and own one’s inevitable ego mortality... and to shed all personal conceits as a result. Who do we become when we realize that we have been, are and will be everyone who has ever been? Nothing and everything. The field of judgment compresses itself into oblivion and the chains of suffering of the narrow personal perspective are forever released. Relationship as a form of surrogate identity rises to supersede and finally engulf the miserable object in its nurturing ground. As above, so below. Each cell of the body has meaning in its relationship to its living breathing constituency, as does each human of the world, and each world of the universe.”

Last Faith Studio is proud to present Sarah Bly’s work, The Adept, in all it’s slitheringly glimmering glory.

credits

released April 24, 2019

Created, Engineered & Recorded by Sarah Bly
Spoken voice: Jane Arden
Mastered by David Last

Catalog Number LFS002

Supplemental sources:
The role of the adept
zenol.tripod.com/adept.html

Vibration by Jane Arden
www.imdb.com/title/tt1735933/

license

all rights reserved

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about

Bleie San Francisco, California

Sarah Bly produces and performs hardware-based experimental electronic music ranging from mercurial noisescapes to a more cerebral, singular techno.

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