On Beauty & Circles: Appreciating Caspian’s ‘Flowers of Light’
During a train ride to work some weeks ago, I had a strange moment of self-reflection. As I get older and life becomes increasingly fast-paced (read: exhausting), treasuring these often quiet moments of solitude in the morning and afternoon becomes more important. I typically spend this time listening to new album releases, diving nose-first into my intimidatingly large ‘To Be Read’ pile or attempting to hide my curiosity as I watch — fascinated and transfixed — the cornucopia of human interactions around me.
Standing in the carriage, I was in the middle of reading Civilization and its Discontents (1930), totally immersed in a dizzying analysis of religion, the history of the Roman empire as a psychical entity and the human fascination with anal erotism, when I was struck by one of Freud’s more evocative passages on beauty:
We may here go on to consider the interesting case in which happiness in life is sought first and foremost in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever it is to be found by our senses and our judgment, the beauty of human forms and movements, of natural objects, of landscapes, of artistic and even scientific creations. As a goal in life, this aesthetic attitude offers little protection against the menace of suffering, but it is able to compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment of beauty produces a particular, mildly intoxicating kind of sensation. There is no very evident use in beauty; the necessity of it for cultural purposes is not apparent, and yet civilization could not do without it. (Freud, 53)
In tandem with reading this particularly arresting passage, my phone was shuffling through its sonic contents and had miraculously settled on ‘Flowers of Light’: a track by cinematic post-rock outfit Caspian and the lead single from their sixth album, On Circles, released on January 24th through Triple Crown Records. In less than six minutes, as I gazed out at the rush of passing cityscapes, I began to have an experience that was eerily similar to the one Freud had so powerfully articulated almost a century ago. In that moment, ‘Flowers of Light’ felt urgent to me — necessary even — and, perhaps, somewhat paradoxically, not entirely useful. However, it was certainly something that I could not do without. It was an intoxicating kind of sensation and there was nothing mild about it.
I would argue that the best examples of post-rock, along with its gruff, bastardly offshoot post-metal, are principally focused on musical storytelling. Think of Isis and their lumbering, monolithic walls of heavy distortion. Think of Explosions in the Sky and the cry of soft melodies. Think of We Lost the Sea and the tension between melancholia and hope. Think of Rosetta and futile shouts into an expansive, existential void. Each song and each record become parts of an ongoing narrative — whether it be in singular fragments or as part of an overarching conceptual frame. Each story is told intently, purposefully and, for the most part, almost exclusively without words (that is, intelligible ones anyway). For me, the best kinds of post-rock function through storytelling-as-mood; experience through atmospherics; embodied recollection through sensory overload.
However, for Caspian, this sense of narrative momentum isn’t necessarily linear. “Life isn’t a series of epic crescendos,” explains guitarist/keyboardist Philip Jamieson in the group’s biography.
“Sometimes it’s the hint of one, or a sequential series of crescendos that come in waves but aren’t set up to go for an obvious jugular, or end up in a completely different place than where you expected, but pivot at the very last moment back to their beginning.”
And it’s this notion of circularity that the listener finds recurring throughout ‘Flowers of Light’. The track opens with a delicate refrain, as hints of gentle plucking from Calvin Joss’ mandolin pepper the background of the mix. Drummer Justin Forrest arrives with a simple percussive beat, all booming bass kicks and crisp, ringing hi-hats pushed to the fore against warbling synth notes from Jamieson. At the halfway point, as momentum builds, the melodic interplay between guitarists Erin Burke-Moran and Jonny Ashburn edges closer together, becoming more entwined as layer upon layer swells and yearns to break free.
With the subtle crack of a rolling snare, the track suddenly drops off a cliff into near silence, just as the towering double helix of bliss reaches its emotional zenith, less of a circular pattern than the foundation of a grand rising structure. After a short gasp, the group rushes back together in concert — synchronised, loud, earnest — as previous passages bend and refract, dancing around one another in a lush symphony of crashing waves. At the track’s end, a final lingering refrain echoes ever outwards; a clarion cry into a dark night, a lighthouse beacon of hope.
Returning to some sense of self-awareness in the train car, all of these thoughts begin to mingle and resonate with my emotional state. Sure, the sense of awe and wonder that I feel listening to ‘Flowers of Light’ is a fleeting one, but as Freud suggests, it is nonetheless intoxicating. Which leads me to reflect on the original question posed, regarding the appreciation of aesthetics within human civilisation: What is the use of beauty?
Listening to Caspian’s music as example, I find Jamieson’s statement to be entirely convincing. After all, it’s easy to agree that life is clearly not a crescendo. However, perhaps in the struggle for definitions and universal purpose, we’re looking for the answer on beauty in all the wrong ways. Maybe beauty is more than a linear property or a circular pattern. Maybe beauty itself is a recursive property. Maybe beauty as an aesthetic attitude relies on a level of dimensionality that transcends our everyday lizard-brain conception of space and time and Euclidean geometry, existing beyond our embodied subjective experiences with life and death. Or, as Freud so elegantly puts it:
“The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions in which things are regarded as beautiful; it can give no explanation of the nature or origin of beauty: as usual, its lack of results is concealed under a flood of resounding and meaningless words.” (Freud 53)
Stream On Circles now through Bandcamp and Spotify below.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. 1930. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton, 2010.
