Four Billion Years

Wondeful, strange - great stuff. I like it very much.

I enjoyed listening to this album this evening. It is lovely, ambient, relaxing, and it mostly leaves you alone to think. I needed that, thank you.

The choral sounds and lilting layers of tinkling music, transport me to a place that TD helped me achieve, when I was so much younger than I am today. Then it was Rubicon and Phaedra, two albums that have remained deeply embedded in my psyche. Sleepwalk, for me, portrays a sense of our journey as an evolving species throughout the eons of existence. That being just a small piece of the previous few billion years. A snapshot in the album of the universe. There are sounds of birth and rebirth within this track, of doing little things as if they were big, and vice versa. Lends a sense of perspective to the single human effort at being. As pitiful and conversely so full of potential as that may be. A track of adventure and experience, with many perspectives.

Creation, a many conjectured source of investigation. I am inclined to envisage the primordial soup bubbling away, giving birth to the building blocks of our forebears. And, a sense of the curious, initial spark of life that begat the conjoining of molecules. Something of a romantic idealism perhaps, but the piano captures it well. Meanwhile the cosmic cogs turned regardless, ultimately keeping us in our place, in the grand scheme of things overall. Incomprehensible as it may be. Then, our reverential roots are touched upon, with Stonehenge, and a reference to one of mankinds first efforts at attempting to understand our place in the cosmos.

I can hear in this track, some influence, which I cannot help but fully endorse and support. The 'dream' being so dear to my own heart. Difficult to avoid thinking of the dawn of mankind and a testimony to those early questions arising in a comparatively primitive consciousness, and yet one that was perhaps nearer to the answer than we are now, for all our technological abilities. Excellent variations throughout, in each track and that overall sense of wholeness, that comes from the collectivity that some of us are still able to tune into.

Finally, the last track, puts it all back into perspective. As I said, despite our accumulation of knowledge and resulting wisdom, we are still, in the greater picture of existence, Floating. Suspended by forces we can only attest to by their effects. Invisible, yet undeniable superstrings of causation and their only sense of proof, according to our investigative faculties and meagre understanding. Knowing sometimes achieves more with less effort. A nice, mild warm down track that earths the listener, by a recognition of our tenuous, delicate balance of being. One star, amongst infinity, draws us and holds us in its sway. A drop in the celestial ocean.