»Caustic Light« by Off The Sky

To gain insight into Off The Sky’s (Jason Corder) current work we cast a ray through “Caustic Light EP”. A new release on autoplate after his “Studies of Form in Transit” [APL014] and “The Transitions” [APL027] (under his old moniker Color By Numbers). This EP grew up evolutionary to what it is now - a collection of four tracks whose atmosphere is created by guitar particles and floating ambient scapes.

When asked what the story behind this “caustic light” concept was, Jason responded, “While the songs evolved, textures and subtleties were molded around a pre-existing idea surrounding caustic light play. The constant random patterns of light at the bottom of a pool or from light cutting through crystals and dancing on a table in prismic fashion always caught my childhood imagination leaving a strange, sentimentaly charged residue. The memories of these caustics has been translated with guitar notes being chopped into granulated shards of sound. The guitar always will, be an instrument that has an illuminus tone to it - especially the higher notes and the picked harmonics like those in ‘through time stained windows’. Also the sign wave seems a perfectly synonymous paralell to steady beams of lights…

So lately dreams have been a prevelent activity for me. An awareness point has been reached in REM of being cognative enough to notice a low, constant dancing of light surrounding objects. There is always a soft, elusive ring flooding my peripheral dream window similar to an effect used to simulate memory floods in an old film called ‘Dark City’.

This effect in a recent lucid dream, birthed an idea for a poem. All of the titles of each track of the EP are all sucessive lines from this short poem which is titled ‘requiem inconnu’. It is an ambiguous story from the last moment memories of an old man as his soul escapes.

her soft circumference,
dripping lightly, diffuses…
like caustic light bending backwards
through time stained windows

The old man, an unknown, lonely hermit, remembers back, like in a dream, to a watery memory of a prevalent past lover. In his time stained mind’s eye, her form bends and flips around like caustic light crawling on coral beneath an abstract ocean. This is his last vision of love lost and love gained again at last through the bridge of his eternal memory.

So each song title essentialy stands on its own but also the whole of all the titles make up a pertinant paragraph of poetry that coincides with the core concept for the album - a track title poem.”

With this EP Jason creates a bridge to his upcoming release ‘it is impossible to say just what i mean’ due out on Stilll records in Belgium this September (www.stilll.org).

Run time 30:57