Kansas City-based experimental musician and artist Collin Thomas has served as a role model for other musicians in the avant-garde field for two decades. Immersed in his art for more than twenty years now, Thomas has stretched the limits of sound and composition to provide his life with an extensive body of work exposing listeners to semi-immersive experience that greatly runs away from accepted musical norms. In his music, every note and silence manages to provoke a range of emotions within a fine dance between what is known and unknown.
Collin Thomas had changed art history as one of pioneer Taylor Deupree, John Cage, Alva Noto, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Morton Feldman, who influenced him. He incorporates most of these influences into his music, which features Sakamoto’s emotionalism, Cage’s conceptual genius, Noto’s digital precision, and Feldman’s minimalism. It is this unusual mixture that gives Thomas the rare ability to create music that is both poignant and cerebral, making it unlike most experimental musicians’ easy-to-emaciate concoctions.
Over time, his works have received great applause due to his ability to transform quite tough abstract ideas into soundscapes that tend to be quite personally resonant and meaningful to listenr. Many might refer to them as meditative or soothing and have auditory space to traverse one’s inner landscape. But, below this facade, lies a highly intentional, often eldering, memory-ridden, and absence-infused music.
On the first day of November, in the year twenty twenty-three, Collin Thomas benefited the world with his magnum opus, “The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air”. This is by now yet another effort of deep personal investment and ambitious attempts. This is not simply an album full of songs but one that dives into depths below emotional trench hazardous due to taking care of a dying loved one-living with dementia. The wonderfully crafted album has sixteen tracks measuring exactly sixteen minutes each, revolving on the cyclical and unpredictable nature of this dreaded malady. The music itself lasts almost four hours altogether.
The album plunges the listener into an entirely different world: an endless dance from the first note to the last with repetition and surprise, weariness and shock all combined in what might be best construed as a sensation familiar to thirstier dimensions: dementia itself. Every individual song becomes an aural picture of intoxication, momentary flashes of brilliance, and the crippling repetitions that mark the course of the moaning, bedecked body and with it the moaning figure. This has been marvelously portrayed by Thomas; what listening art is hard and enlightening.
So much more than merely listening, this album is meant for people to actually feel the weight of dementia-its grip that is never-ending over memory and self, its power to ruin and obliterate, yet to humble. This is the kind of album that requires listening, patience, and empathy because it opens a window into the lives of these afflicted people and their loved ones. It should be lived rather than merely listened to-exploration across the gauze-covered eyes of time and the echo of recollection to be more than an album to listen to, The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air.
The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air Album Track List:
Early Onset:
“Early Onset” is the first track off the album “The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air” by Collin Thomas. An unusual entrance into a voyage that is both sonically captivating and emotionally earth-shattering. No one would know by looking at it that there could be so much depth in this minimal work of art. Thomas, as in all his works, evokes strong imagery and powerful emotional atmospherics by few elements of sound. At the core of “Early Onset,” through which it throbs, lies the piano, with gentle but deliberate notes that carry a specific weight for the listener. Everything slowly unfolds, note by note, as though it wants to concoct a sense of solemn beauty: pulling into a quietly haunting soundscape that feels both intimate and spacious.
As the song develops, Thomas tangles in some more gentle subtlety amidst all this to capture a certain kind of emotional complexity within that piece. Such texture brings a delicate percussive layer integrated into it, whereas the very soft synths-they’re heavy and haunted-deepen-not deplete, deepen-the actuality of contemplation itself. This assembled many things-the ethereal quality of the piece-would, turning a simple piano melody into an auditory experience within which would hang a rich texture. Therefore, the slow tempo and sparse arrangement make a space in which sound can enjoy full appreciation; thus will the listener be completely immersed in the story as it narrates itself.
“Early Onset” becomes the mood setter for the rest of the album, steeped in memory and loss, and pervading the whole “The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air” by tying it up with an understated style echoing the slow decay of memory in dementia-repeats and fading recognitions punctuated by clear moments-absorbed as much by listening. as the sound made more beautiful by emotional depth against simplicity; this for sure will be a strong kick-off.
Is He Gone:
This piece, “Is He Gone”, the second track from Collin Thomas’s album “The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air”, continues along the sonic excursion that was begun in “Early Onset”, though venturing very much deeper into far more complex emotional territory. The initial piano melodies are very much the same ethereal graceful slow tempo that had gone before, but heavier in feel and changed perspective with respect to all that is going on. Under this premise, the listener is thrown at once into an atmosphere that is calm yet heavy with foreboding, as if in imminent heralding of shadowy psychological implosion. The piece is soft yet grand tones from the piano frail but infinitely beautiful because it has anchorage.
Definitely, amidst the rest of the song, Thomas also presents very muted but critical shifts in his soundscapes; underneath that epic, surging then low-burning currents shift the whole concept even closer to urgent angst. Those components do appear to be then lower in provenance from string and percussions, coming off as thus a shadowy and sometimes jarring atmosphere, which really makes a perfect foil to rather fragile piano melting melodies. The way in which these two parts intertwine-dark and smoldering-on one side and uplifting and soaring on the other-reflective of the thematic exploration of the dementia issue in the album, often characterized by bright spells overshadowed by loss and confusion. Again, the song strikes a perfect balance between calmness and tension, hanging the piano with melancholy undertones into something that might be engrossing for streaming or may very well evoke a stirring sensation in the ear of the listener. “Is He Gone,” deepening the emotional plinth of “The Gauze Eyed Gaze of Bracketed Air,” sharpens and clears a lot of memory and absence more elaborately and layered. The way this piece moves imitates that of dementia, sharply entering gloomier, unaired realities after having moments of bright clarity. That’s what makes the piece so lovely-there is this duplicity in which the listener should suspend emotion long enough for beauty and pain to coexist. That by the end of the song, the last note still hangs long.
The Wrong Banquet:
This album of Collin Thomas, The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air, goes farthest in hearing the emotional as well as sonic narrative of “The Wrong Banquet”. The sound emerges to trap the listener in its brilliance of sound design with a touch of eeriness. Delicate strings from the light piano open the sound, creating a semi-not-quite-celestial brightness while that same light touch impotently engender a wall to wall record. With the generally slow pace of the album, every note gets its moment and appears to have been laid out on its track momentarily and purposefully-upon sounding, enjoyed equally by wonder and by sadness in feeling.
Soaring via the track-The extra layers, by Thomas’ mastery, gradually come over this same track and therefore dedicate it to even more emotionally deeper levels. Entry within guitar strings is very fleeting, but cuts so much majesty into the song and brings yet another heavenly quality. These very smooth string grooves accompany an incomparable warmth to piano sounds, peculiarly cooler, and thereby create this very dynamic relation of both instruments’ interplay. Further soft synth that, by their lush reverberated sounds, gives even more of an amazingly earthly, almost tactile aspect to the music, advances that progression dramatically. With added screeching voices of the synths, however, it brings the music closer to reality, bitter, sad somehow immutable. Those shrieks, however, starkly contrast the synth’s almost or otherwise heavenly ambience. The Wrong Banquet shines brightest because it is exactly what connects with the many facets of human emotions; particularly it will become evident due to the album’s concerns on loss and memory.
“The Wrong Banquet” is indeed the other aspect of “The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air.” It divides the beauty with a sort of hidden tension. The beautiful slow motion of the track-in terms of the delicate playing of piano, guitar, and synths-taps in into something heavier than air: not only listening but an emotional journey. Every single thing in it has been organically arranged so as to enter with the song through sound and sensation-almost soothing, almost stifling. This therefore makes “The Wrong Banquet” one of the strong pieces on the album and an intense analysis of the questions of dementia and the human condition. It remains in wonder and ponder long after the last notes wane.
The Lies We Told:
This is one of the very heavy tracks from Collin Thomas’s album, “The Gauzed Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air”– “The Lies We Told” wraps around you with the chill and gloom cast by its melancholy. It starts right at that dark point on a note indicating its gloomy presence with all sounds cunctus weight bearing on them into soundspace. Very emotionally charged, rich, and resonant piano notes are intended to bring about a depressed air that sounds like music before one gears up for a song full of emotional intricacies in a person’s life. The eerie strings begin with heightening and deepening the sound toward the close of this song to wrap around the lonely piano melodies. Those strings, whose sound is uncomfortably close to otherworldliness, would be sure to heighten the already emotionally heightened song by weaving in their despair and anxiety. In this context, the slow and steady tempo of the album actually works its magic by letting the listener soak up every note into that atmosphere of discomfort and contemplation. Massive, resounding piano and thick, immersive strings create a world of silent depression and isolation, trapping the listener into an intimate soundscape that is burdened.
“The Lies We Told” is a master lesson of atmospheric making, dark, brooding, and painstakingly sound-designed. Haunted whisper synths are effective for bringing eeriness into the music and to also punctuate the composition with countermelodic moments of piercing intensity. These, always subtly evoked, are the still-dark disembodied-sounding spaces surrounding the shadowy-sinister atmosphere created by opening sounds, while also saliently keeping the listener entirely submerged in the psychological world that Thomas has shaped. It is a kind of music that purposely goes very slowly for themes to sink down properly. And in the end, it’s just breathing powerfully into you emotional depths and the thematic richness that defines “the gauzed-eyed gaze of bracketed air.”
Collin Thomas makes wonders in showing imaginative use of sound as an investigative probe into nuanced emotional, psychological experiences in a work of extreme poignance and high philosophical richness: “The Gauze Eyed Gaze of Bracketed Air”. It mandates full attention and emotion from the listener; this isn’t one to casually pick through. Of course, there is great reward for those willing to make the effort. Experimental-music lovers should not miss this; nor should anyone who has a passing interest in how life has to do with art should be without “the gauzed-eyed gaze of bracketed air.” It says everything about Collin Thomas the composer and what it means to be human as well. This is not just music; it’s a memory within itself. The long expanse beyond the last note will be felt by experience.
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