Orlando by Nelson Beer

"Orlando slouches towards Bethlehem to be born again.

An echo is a reprise. It is heard when a sound is reflected off a distant surface—a wall or a cliff—and returns misshapen. Clarity wanes as the noise knocks back and forth. Before long it dissipates entirely.

Memories behave like sounds, too. Over lifetimes they gently strike the walls inside our bodies and lapse into abstraction. Inherited memories, however, (composite thoughts of past lives that do not belong to us) are intrinsically abstract. Like unfamiliar sounds they disturb and provoke intrigue. Memories like these are not generated by sensory experience, they precede birth and consciousness, insisting on being re-lived by whomever may come next.

Orlando has been young for so long.

Ambivalence breeds in his tendency toward inconsummate passions and entropic forms.

Doom-stricken prophecies of swollen red suns unravel as they ride over fecund rhythms; cascading scales gather like ruffles around a monastic ode to the earth and sea. This record moves between the opaque and the translucent, feigning chaos while framing the condition of living as a receptacle of disembodied memories as like holding the world within oneself.

The seven songs bleed into one another; adjunct insect-like sounds scatter around established melodic lines before succumbing to the ether. Trying to trace them from end to end is futile, like straining to recall a memory that never belonged to you.

Orlando is an aural fractal, yielding detail at all scales."

—Words by Olamiju Fajemisin