(ER082) M. Anne Quinn – Nihilwaves

Perhaps you occasionally start to feel that pull on the head, that none of this music means anything. That all the free art you enjoy, all the artists you connect with, and all the albums you are subject to coming to labels like Effluvia and all of it’s friends, is just all floating about in the brainwaves of nihil. There are times when you are provoked to dance. To laugh. To listen carefully and feel goosebumps. To feel alienated, overwhelmed, relaxed, energetic, or aroused, to indulge in the arts that is to say, oh how it may give you feelings of assurance. Assurance to the fruit of our listening as we look at the shadows of day change and the sunshine illuminating scenarios that send us veering to and fro. But yet, in times of darkness, we see past the emotion and realize how fleeting it is, even when you find music that an artist devotes her or his whole life to, all that can be drawn are brief stimuli smiles that ricochet off our stillborn flesh, and “Nihilwaves” by M. Anne Quinn, Now, I’m not saying that this release is fleeting, apathetic. That is the beauty of it. The two tracks on these albums both scream into my ears a mastered surrender of form, the form of attempting to create beauty or worth as well as the forms of traditional music. With noise this artist shouts his surrender, and the vapid revelation of art’s meaninglessness is shouted, and paradoxically, what results is something of great beauty, great worth. The feeling, the frustration, and the clearheadedness with which this body of philosophical distortion presents itself are anything but fleeting, and upon listening to it, art will both show itself as a delight and as a futile endeavor all in one painful, heavyweight motion inside your skull. What results is an exhausting experience, and one worth taking if you want to revitalize the inner struggle inside trying to realize what it is that art is adding to the cosmos.