check out ~ the book

check out ~ the book (hornschaft, 2016)

«CHECK OUT is a project involving sound, images and words. It is divided into sections (chapters / tracks) and has three main granularities, i.e. excess, exposure, and death» ~ horschaft

This is simply gorgeous. No exaggerating, this is the first and second and third impression on this release. Even before hearing the music, holding this beautiful LP-sized book with matte-finished hardcover, full of atmospheric photographs and collected impressions makes my heart beating faster. Maybe just because I like photography and work in printing business, but I don't think it is the only reason. The book unfolds masterfully captured moments of fleeting beauty, seen in tiny details, in landscape, in urban and naturalistic, in simple movements and casual glances. And while the music starts its weaving, your attention is already caught by spells of this creation. It is really hard to make something outstanding in times of ambient music abundance, which we are facing now. Revival of physical formats paves new ways of representation of highly subjective artistic visions and it results in variety of forms – handmade editions, special inserts, quests for ordering, etc. But despite the common idea that music must speak for itself, it's actually a new level of music production – making not really a product, but an art object. Imagine yourself visiting art gallery: some pictures on the walls, subtle music playing... Your impression is fleeting, it depends on so many factors and lies under so much pressure of the modern life-style and its rhythm, that it dissipates as quickly, as the morning dew under the sun since you leave the gallery... Subjective means personal, and personal art it's always just a tiny window, a glance inside the world of the Other. The less objective you are trying to be, the bigger this window gets, expanding the ways of perceive and understand each other. Simple idea, but not that easy to follow when it comes to practice. But if you have the exhibition delivered right at your place, carefully prepared for revisiting its virtues, hiding some details for attentive exploration... Probably it gives much more freedom both for you and for the artist. Ability to explore deeper is a luxury in a modern world.

I won't divide the music and pictures of this edition, I'd rather tell that they are as inseparable as our five senses. Interconnection of impressions creates polarity, accumulates the impulse to discovery, and that's a very good approach in case of ambient music. It creates the deepness and instead of hearing just another melodic guitar ambience and dusty, melancholic soundscapes we plunge into the world of CHECK OUT without hesitation, exploring sensation of every tiny detail of mood, which appears only once – right now, right at this page, with this exact transition of the sounds. This album gives us an environment so fragile and sensitive to any change. It seems that CHECK OUT is about capturing the fleetness of our life, about unavoidable death of every beautiful thing...  But at some point of deepening inside it you may realize that this is happens all the time and that's what life is, a game of perception, of the novelty and excess, of discovery and forgetting... This album not just captures something, but brings the deeper level in the game.

preview ~ support