- Christina Giannone creates experimental, ambient drone-scapes designed to alter her listener’s conscious state. Utilising a variety of digital synthesisers, editing techniques and field recordings, through the manipulation of sound she seeks to transport her audience out of their material reality and transcend the confines of their physical realm.

Reality Opposition is her second release on the local label Room40, operated by Lawrence English, also a celebrated artist and composer. Giannone’s previous release, Zone 7, explored concepts of psychological introspection through engagement with the subconscious, with Giannone stating, “It’s in this place, away from consciousness that you will find the soul’s domain, where there are “zones” and “portals” to other dimensions within the trenches of the psyche.” She furthers these audio-cognitive experiments on Reality Opposition, a five-track suite of music that seeks to provoke, through distortion, drone and repetition, the onset of a dissociative state.

Attempts to alter consciousness through sound, particularly drones, are not uncommon within the experimental and avant-garde musical community. Most notably, the British electronic group Coil sought to achieve this effect with their 1998 album Time Machines, with John Balance, one of the group’s co-founders, explaining their intent as such. “There’s a handful of responses which we've had where what happened to the listeners was exactly what we intended to happen. There would be some kind of temporal disruption caused by just listening to the music, just interacting with the music.”

Does Reality Opposition achieve this goal? Its five tracks are composed of, predominately, drones of distorted static, with occasional and subtle variations in both pitch and frequency. Certainly, when played at a high volume, in an environment with minimal stimulation, such as a dark room, the mind does tend to wander, evoking the feeling of being trapped in a wind tunnel, or on a windy beach in winter. There is a very real sense of the end embedded in the tracks, not the end in a destructive or final sense, but of being on the edge of something, such as a precipice, surrounded by an endless expanse of time and space.

Reality Opposition, and ambient drone in general, is not music for everyone. Many wouldn't deign to even describe it as music at all. However, what makes ambient music so inherently fascinating -and moving- is its sense of mystery. Without underpinning their emotional power, conventional pop or rock music is, for most people, both recognisable and understandable, even if they are not musicians themselves. Ambient compositions provoke emotion in ways that more traditional musical structures are incapable of, if only for their lack of subtlety and insistence on overstating their intent. Many people struggle with this, likewise with other forms of instrumental music, or music with lyrics in a foreign language, as it pushes them beyond their comfort zone and into uncharted territories.

Music, or more accurately, the concept and definition of what actually constitutes music, will differ greatly from individual to individual. Reality Opposition could certainly be described as album for those with niche tastes, but that would be doing the album and the genre of ambient drone, a major disservice. This is an album for anyone with a taste for something different, for those that like their music to be non-linear, obscure and enigmatic. Whether it enables them to reach a dissociative state will depend on personal experience and circumstance, but even without a transcendent experience it is a still a composition imbued with a powerful, haunting beauty.

- Nick Stephan.