Label: Lascaux21
Released: 2009

01. Dawn: Source Tone
02. Gate: Inner Listener
03. Station: Chikatetsu I (Transfer)
04. Car 1: Agent
05. Car 2: Heart Sutra
06. Car 3: U R My Broadway Boogie Woogie Man LOL
07. Car 4: Kitto Ne
08. Transfer: Map
09. Car 5: Commuterphagia
10. Car 6: Chikatetsu II
11. Car 7: Thinking Of You
12. Car 8: Chikatetsu III
13. Terminus: Station To Station

Question: what is chikatetsu? Answer: chikatetsu means "subway" in Japanese language. But from now on, there's also the second answer: it's the title of musical album by Tim Gerwing. We take care of that second issue, of course, though, in fact, it will give us a deepen answer to the first topic, what mustn't had to be obvious, but - giving you the conclusion already and destroying, maybe too boring, expectation for the final verdict - is. But let's start from scratch...

Tim Gerwing is an artist who comes from Canadian Vancouver and his intention was to show the psychological and emotional spaces that derive from chikatetsu: the relations of human-human and human-technology. The album, released in ecopack, came in Lascaux21, his personal label. By the same way the previous two artist's albums appeared: "Being To Being" in 2002 and "The Butterfly Effect" in 2005. And after four years the time has come in his life for the episode entitled "Chikatetsu", dedicated to a very specific thing, above all: to a named one, one of the symbols of human industrialization, that heart of public transport in Japan.

Gerwing lists in his inspirations the music by artists such as Brian Eno, Vangelis, David Sylvian, Mark Isham, Kitaro and Jon Hassell. So you shouldn't be expecting psychedelic manipulations or other kinds of that twisted things. This album has nothing to do with the downtempo side of the psyscene, however, its sound can be drawn up by some likeness. Two releases especially come to my thought. Technically, "Chikatetsu" is like Omnimotion's "Dream Wide Awake": it has the closest relation to ambient, but for sure it isn't ambient by oneself; it's based on ambient designs, but it skilfully gets inspirations from different styles/genres of music. Emotionally, "Chikatetsu" is like Ian Ion's "Gringo Locomotion": you are alone against a background of the world, your inner voice talk with figments of your civilization. So it's not a psychedelic ambient. So more emotional, or abstract maybe it is? Definitely the emotions play here the leading role, but abstraction is here clearly discernible as well and its supportness, soon, will worthy of a plus.

The first track of the Gerwing's vision is "Dawn: Source Tone", oneiric ambient, which awakes a solitary consciousness into a new day, before entering in destined to it chikatetsu. In "Gate: Inner Listener" our thoughts are in a subway already.

Expectation of our train lasts,
Electronic impulses grow round,
Everything moves with a big speed,
The sounds (people and surroundings) blur.

In the third track, titled "Station: Chikatetsu I (Transfer)", we at once take a part in the expected journey through the chikatetsu railways. The lights flash with lightning speed, though we observe it with a stony stance. On another track, "Car 1: Agent", the album's music gains an additional, radical, futuristic plane. The composition make me think of a blissful, intoxicating nihilism of some moments from The Future Sound Of London's "Accelerator" and Amorphous Androgynous' "Tales Of Ephidrina". Not only: after all, stylistically as there as here, the communication between ambient and techno grows excessively a feeling of "dancing abstraction" into which we are invited. We are receiving an element of dreamy abstraction (we only seemingly did want to dance, simply we did like that state), which in "Car 2: Heart Sutra" becomes a real, personal drama. Sad, melancholic sounds, from which a depressed vocal emerges, surround us and remind us of alienation.

But the sixth track, "Car 3: U R My Broadway Boogie Woogie Man LOL", mines some optimism from that hopeless situation. Motives progression, typical for that music, accents two stages here: the first one is an ambient jazz, while the second one is more jazzy, including a strong vocal. Chikatetsu turns our attention to its internationalism, diversity, which, however, becomes for our consciousness only an interesting thing, an empty fact. In "Car 4: Kitto Ne" we have an ambient jazz as well: dim, with narcotic pictures, which in a certain moment becomes more jazzy like the previous one, and here only: also weirdly happy due to a piano melody. On the eighth track, "Transfer: Map", there are ambient pads and vocal; melancholia is our backbone in the chikatetsu world. Whereas "Car 5: Commuterphagia" is a mechanical rhythm of a percussion; darkness and sadness of motives; futurism. We stop here in the monotonous thoughts of ours, we don't care about departures; after all, we will be on time - chikatetsu always has something up our sleeves. "Car 6: Chikatetsu II" is a complete ambient...

The impulses of techno-underground
Become the industrial flashes of our brain.
Because: yes - what's here, is also in our thoughts already
And we can't think about something else.

The composition number eleven, "Car 7: Thinking Of You", has, apart from jazz influences, also timid (but natural) rock influences: everything served in a light colour, not forgetting about a vast ambient blur of that. The sound with every another moment increase its intensity and tragedy thanks to the elevated strings, when meanwhile a bass guitar is the accelerator of the arrangement's underbody. The next track, "Car 8: Chikatetsu III" is a pressure of forgetfulness, isolation and bitterness. We have the ambient sounds of the chikatetsu's platforms strengthened by synthetic signals. The pads and strings escalate that whole enormous loneliness. The last track on the CD is "Terminus: Station To Station". It could be seem that more calm "Chikatetsu III" will "accurately" end the album with its shocking tone. But chikatetsu never stops and that sounds in the message of the truly final track...

From one station - another station,
To another station - another one still to come,
The next one for someone - for us maybe.
May: be...

...The one thing which is with us, are we by oneself and our reminiscenses, which maybe as the only one are reminding us that we are human in this chikatetsu kingdom. "Station To Station" is a masterpiece due to its daring consolidation of that specific charm the album as the entire one has, not saying about that it has the most entrancing arrangement from the technical point of view; especially, when it's in the fusion with extremely beautiful nostalgia of the main melody... That's not the end. The CD has thirteen tracks, but the album has them fourteen: the hidden composition is "Echo: Prelude To A Telephone Conversation". Inside the album there's an info that it can be downloaded from www.lascaux21.com/chikatetsu/prelude.php - there is just the must to write an e-mail address and then the file can be downloaded at once. The file is 192 kbps mp3, 63 MB. The track lasts exactly 46 minutes and it's the ambient in style of "Car 6: Chikatetsu II": unsettling, industrial, underground one. On account of idea, it constitutes an absolutely unique expansion of an Album (as a musical release) - a totally superb idea! But you shouldn't listen to this track before the CD, because (prescinding from its tighten style in relation to that CD) it would rather difficult to understand it fully. ...And only here is the true end of the album.

There's many methods according to we can divide artists. The basic is, that on one side there are artists, who are copying music of the others, using the others artists, being inspired (inter alia) by them and creating similar music, and precisely the others - who maybe as well are being inspired (inter alia) by a particular music of other artists, but imperceptibly somehow, in the effect creating something inventive and groundbreaking. So logically, de facto, it's not about the inspiration's source, but about the result. The result is the true. Gerwing presents himself in "Chikatetsu" as a representative of the first group: for sure he didn't create a masterpiece with respect to widely undeniable, but being inspired by "knowns", many artists and styles, he created against that background a kind of a masterpiece of a given topic, giving into that his own, perceptible particle - and that ultimately proves his class. It's a human (Gerwing's) journey into a human world (chikatetsu's). "Chikatetsu" - this is a dedication to chikatetsu which charms of evocativeness, a phenomenal impression, so it deserves for the title of the perfect music on the subject. From the perspective of ambient "movement", which tell us impressionistically stories about the world we live in, he did an excellent work on the idea and its later incarnation. There's his own metaphor: a subway, in Gerwing's inexpressible opinion, is a state of our hibernation. And on purpose I'm not saying about chikatetsu - that subway in the Japanese style - but about a subway in general, because analysing the physics (empiricism + realism = ambient sounds) and metaphysics (personalism + surrealism = ambient music) he created the comprehensive, full image of one human being in the world of not-a-one human being.

So "Chikatetsu" is the reflection of the titled physics - chikatetsu as a place in human life that has to deal with that human because of that human - and the titled metaphysics - the thoughts that spontaneously get out within entrance to that specific underground. This is a conceptional album, that came off in every point of its plan. Gerwing blends colours of spontaneity and sequenceness. Since there are many notes/melodies that come from nothing, as if live, as well there are borders that define the whole; we pass by the tracks inspired by ambient and elements of jazz. The first listening gives us the basic answer on the subject of the album's content: a colour of reflection (we are travelling lonely) and humbleness (before technology) - is threaded through all the compositions. Another listenings to "Chikatetsu" deepen the answer connected also with a timeless relation of a person to ownself in that huge world of technology. The static nostalgic and melancholic loneliness of being find oneself imprisoned in fetters of the dynamic architecture full of glaring lights. We - alive after all, stand in stillness for the moment of the ride in the chikatetsu system. Chikatetsu - dead after all, becomes alive for the moment of the ride and is directing us. The sudden notes of melodies rivet our attention in the always sleepy, moving very fast chikatetsu, while we - well, we maybe want to move in a way, but being stuck inside chikatetsu, couldn't shake out of that state, making the fusion of reality and unreality in mind, after a moment we open our eyes... and tomorrow, we want it or not, another journey somewhere in the chikatetsu's universe will be waiting for us - because that Gerwing's chikatetsu becomes, ultimately, a metaphor of the confrontation with the vast expanse of our own's psychological-emotional evolution changed into industrialization.