This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about the beauty and power of Old Solar’s version of the Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.
This is one of two posts in preparation for the 2 days of Post.Festival 2023, the largest post-rock festival in the US and an event I’ve been dying to go to in recent years. I’m going to cover two bands that have been crucial to my love and experience of post-rock as well as difficult touchpoints on my healing journey of the last couple years due to difficult associations.
This is a sweeping album. The concept of it feels like a post-rock version of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, and I think they capture the sentiment of each season well. You’re likely to be moved by one or several of them. Favorite track: Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands.
Bandcamp – My Review for SEE by Old Solar
SEE flows through the ebbs and flows of the seasons, the highs and lows of abundance and lack as the course of beautiful, heart-rending change. It is nothing short of a glorious album. Although I suspect the band are deeply Christian, the well-captured experience of the vibrant change of presence and absence remind me of Taoism and my own deep interest in it; this album captures the resonance of something like an I Ching-esque progression of yin and yang through the seasons.
I’ve found the track: “Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands” particularly haunting. My first connection with this album was a brief obsession, a spring dalliance of sorts. Months later, I woke from dreams with this song stuck in my mind, hearing it over and over on repeat. I fastidiously dug through my album collection to recall where it came from, niggling in my subconscious until I rediscovered this album. I’ve never had that experience prior or since with any other song.
The song represents my favorite season, fall, and it expresses that shift into a pensive mode of fullness slowing down, being harvested and brought in before the cold. It also feels pensive as though a high feeling is now on the edge of loss – that transition of connection into withdrawal and repose (Hermit – Virgo) and an independent vibrance of compassion, growth, and abundant harvest despite this (Empress – Libra). It also feels like a time of things balancing out, the decisions and efforts of the year being weighed out into their results, karma playing out, and the symbolism of all that balance in the equinox (Justice – also Libra) just before the strong transformation of the reaping and movement into quiet (Death – Scorpio).
As far as I’m concerned, if you can listen to this song and not feel its poignancy, your heart is completely cold. It pulls strongly at a variety of emotional depths like few songs do. Returning to this album has been a slow and difficult process for me, but it’s one I have relished listening to again recently. Old Solar is one of the main bands I’m thrilled to see on this trip to Post.Festival.
NOTE: Use the time stamps in the YouTube description to jump to the song
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