Tunes of Negation - Like the Stars Forever and Ever (2020)

Shackleton’s open-ended musical project Tunes Of Negation featuring Takumi Motokawa, Raphael Meinhart, and a guest appearance from Heather Leigh is back on Cosmo Rhythmatic after its acclaimed debut last year.

While Shackleton’s output has often attempted to cross all musical borders, the newest manifestation of Tunes of Negation suggests themes of impermanence, rebirth, and transcendence with a fiercer dedication than ever before. In attempting to balance shadow with light, ‘Like The Stars Forever And Ever’ runs from sombre or gentle passages to dissonance through to uplifting finales and the whole range between.

As always, Shackleton’s music feels ceremonial and narrative, at once commenting and facilitating the journey of all entities engaged in ritual listening. The fragility of life and the awareness of an inevitable end are transcribed musically in all their discordant, fearful, and mournful aspects. However, this does not at all make the album an overtly gloomy, depressing affair. In every track, the music ends up soaring towards a sense of ecstatic dissolution. A representation of a bewildering cosmic love in the transient, mortal nature of all things. A re-assimilation of energy towards new forms.

There are no attempts to solve ultimate mysteries though, rather celebrate mystery in all its power, beauty, and contradictions. Shackleton’s ever-masterful embroidery of tonal and atonal percussions, of acoustic and electronic organs, of electronic sound design and physical ambiance, is—as always in his style—organized in compositions in which hypnotic repetition is the basis for evolution and ultimate change. The feast of life, death, and rebirth. Of fluctuation between multiple states of being and non-being. Like the stars, forever and ever.