EDGE OF BEING is a beguiling album from composer Graham Hadfield — existential sound sculptures hanging in imaginary space and suspended in time.
From the captivating pointillism of Emergence of Being where existence emerges from the interaction of the individual parts; through the bewitching ambiguity of what’s real and what’s not in Transfiguration; to the hanging-in-limbo purgatory of Suspended Existence; the visceral, post-industrial existential nightmare of Cerberus; and the searing culmination of At the Threshold of No Longer Existing; EDGE OF BEING lures the listener in with a spellbinding, between-worldly atmosphere, with conflicted feelings of acceptance and doubt in our beliefs and our sense of time and space.
Taking initial inspiration from the film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, EDGE OF BEING forges its own path, evoking a perpetual search for truth and meaning in the wilderness of our existence, exploring what is real, what is not real and the continuous interference and ambiguity in-between.
Combining ideas from spectral music and musique concrète, putting recorded sounds (birdsong, tunnel water, rusty metal, a dog crying, confidence tones from the Windscale nuclear power station, a Sixxen…) under a microscope, refracting them through a prism and reforming them as new timbres, harmonies and textures, it is an evocative and organic marriage of nature and technology, of analogue and digital, of human and post-human.
Mastered by Tom Burridge.
Cover photography by Todd Trapani.