#john bence

Bence is a composer. If the album demonstrates anything, it is that the word describes him more than would any of its attendant modifiers. Even to suggest that his work is orchestral, choral or chamber music is to deny its scope, spectrality and power. The solo pieces on offer here defy their supposed boundaries, spatially as regards soundstage and in terms of temperament. Voices behave similarly; a solo vocal contribution, as with the higher-register contribution to “Gabriel, Archangel of Yesod,” seems outsized, inhabiting a space larger than itself, an effect amplified as the second and lower voice enters in ineffable harmony. Instrumental forces are martialed in commensurate fashion, quite literally in the military cadences of “Kamael, Archangel of Geburah.” The drum is somehow both disembodied but transfigured, more than present while floating above the already ethereal orchestration.

I’ve rendered all of this as disparate, elements inhabiting their own spaces. Far from it, Bence’s music harnesses a power of unity very rare among those employing such an ambitious sonic ensemble. Yes, some of that power resides in juxtaposition, as when “Metatron, Archangel of Kether”’s suffocating climax of distortion and hammer-blow repetition dissipates with a sort of sudden ferocity, leaving only the quasi-comfort of an anonymous scene of street or park floating atop a sea of reverb. The nightmare and its postlude comprise two sides of that proverbial coin, the light and dark antipodes forming the continuum along which Bence’s work travels. Beyond any seeming disintegration attributable to timbral forces or inter-track pauses, the album is a singular statement with an emotional purpose to match.

A recent reading of William P. Blatty’s Legion, with its representations and ruminations on the nature of angels, places this aspect of Bence’s suite of miniatures in stark relief. These are beings of extraordinary power which, though disembodied, is somehow irrevocably bound up with the multiplicity of human experience. As the last three pieces unfold, containing sonic elements from preceding events, that unity of purpose becomes crystal clear. The impact of a single sustained tone or multi-colored chord can be devastating, even at low volume, but the whole illumines, radiating beauty as much as casting shadow, the perfect embodiment of beings transcending the clumsy verbiage of polarity.