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Moral Calculus

Make-Believe Machines

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Customer Reviews

5 stars///hearts

This album is one solid shape-shifting menagerie of sublime tone. The pacing of the album is perfect, and timing and tempo changes are handled delicately and with painstaking deliberation. The album uses point and counter point well. Up tones and down tones whip the listener into a frenzy, while quietly bedding him///her down again. The artists in make believe machines have created a companion piece, the music itself is complementary to activity, whether it be biking, painting, walking up flights of stairs in abandoned buildings, or traversing the morning commute. The only question in this listeners thousand brains, is what comes next for this striking band.

Enter the Portal of Unparalleled Demension

With their debut, Moral Calculus, Make-Believe Machines ushers forth an album comprised of cutting-edge classical soundscapes capable of seducing music-lovers across the spectrum. The music's orchestral magnitude alone is enough to capture most open ears, but there is also a tremendous architectural depth involved, which integrates rich themes and messages into tracks masked by mind-jarring titles. Each piece has a heartbeat of its own containing abundant variation and emotional quality, and yet each track transitions harmoniously into the following piece, allowing for a seamless, summative listen. The exceptionally lengthy tracks such as "Punctured Placenta and Post-Birth Peril," are journey-driven explorations into new and profound landscapes drenched with dazzling light and dismal darkness. "The Tragedy of the Sprite, Dragonfly, and Crow" likewise unwinds in a fairy-tale-esque form, coaxing one's imagination to wander among the mythical foliage of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Aside from the string-heavy, orchestral sounds incorporated on several tracks, Make-Believe Machines also utilize ambient sounds and effects, which further enhance the enveloping atmospheres they create. "And Sleep Took Their Cudgeled Bodies" & "Fallen Shackles of A Weathered Jouster" are both perfect examples of this type of atmospheric construction. On each of these tracks, the instruments are gentle and captivating with an accompaniment of natural night sounds––crickets joined by other unidentified nocturnal insects. Along with these creatures, you’ll hear a man describing the formulaic approach to create radio-friendly hits threaded through "Fallen Shackles of A Weathered Jouster." Embedding such advice into an obscure track provokes us to decipher the included clip as a sorrowful sign of our society's "top 10 chart" and the music for money-making mentality. The poetic words, "Shackled to a dead horse, long over-beaten, He jousted in the dense fog of the walking comatose" sung placidly at the end of this track likewise reflect this intent. The two shortest tracks on the album, "A Childe Grafts A Bone" and "A Skeleton Grafts A Childe," are expectedly less epic than their companions, but in their brevity they yield playful, percussion-driven rain-drops that call to mind the upbeat styling of Thomas Newman. The most audible vocal performance resides toward the end of the album on "Thin Glass Islands on a Clouded Sea." The lyrics themselves are graciously less cryptic than the titles of their songs, although the image-evoking style still serves to maintain the mystical nature of the album as a whole. The philosophical density of the words encapsulated here are illuminated by the persistent metaphor of ships carrying us through the unpredictable ocean of life, which constantly leaves us with the choice to "freeze up" or "sail on." As I listen to the lyrics, "We struck out across dark waves, straining to make precise of the vague, ancient orders," I envision myself leaving the ports of Ancient Greece and charting a course that leads me into the utterly unknown, glacier-filled sea that surrounds the arctic pole. And I get the sense from the final line, "We tried to find the truth, but our ship was too weighed and sinks" that all along humanity has been on a narrow-minded quest searching for an idea that exists in no concrete form. Again, the music leads the listeners on a dynamic voyage, which is aided this time by a metaphoric-map of words alluding to the myriad of experiences encountered by humans as we attempt to cope with the tangible reality in front of us while also preparing for the incalculable unknown that awaits. In a fluent motion, the album arrives at its concluding track, "What the Wind Whispered to the Wheat." Here, a piano takes control, cascading like water across mountains as it sculpts sharp cliffs into chimerical canyons. And with this, Make-Believe Machines has rekindled the past-life allure of musical composition as a means of painting paths in between the x's and the y's of life's incomprehensible lapses of safety.

If This Music Had a Face I Would Want to Make Out With it

Have you ever wondered why it sounds like popular music has an identical song pattern, shallow subject matter and freakishly similar lack of creativity? That is probably because it does! Fortunately for you, a new possibility for the musical experience has finally dropped out of heaven and into your quality-starved grasp. Make Believe Machines first creates and then fulfills the desire for a drastically different and daring sound. Their creative combination of beautiful instrumentation and trendsetting ambience not only enlightens the senses but is filled with deep meaning and purposeful structure. Whether it’s the voice of a pop-culture monster babbling in the background of tragic instruments or the passionate exploration of the philosophy of struggle, the ongoing stream of layers reveal the complexity and emotion that runs deep throughout. Birds chirping in the background of a playful piano piece, or a thunderstorm building up joy and fear in the midst of beautiful violins are only the surface of the wonderful, inspiring treasury of rare thoughtfulness and the original beauty inherent in this musical masterpiece.

Top Albums and Songs By Make-Believe Machines

Moral Calculus, Make-Believe Machines
 View In iTunes
  • $9.99
  • Genres: Classical, Music
  • Released: Feb 17, 2009
  • ℗ 2008 Shrieking Tree

Customer Ratings

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