Cognitive dissonance is a person's mental rejection to an idea that strongly conflicts with one that the person holds dear. "You believe in God, I don't — at all — so I'm going to shut down this conversation, walk away, and remember you as an idiot." Visually, this refusal to find common ground looks like people in the Matrix convulsing and turning into Agent Smith.
As a journalist — or just as a patient, good human being in transit — you should avoid making up your mind on which side of a fence is best. Give new things a try: maybe you will find something redeeming in Nicki Minaj's music; maybe someone did actually see a ghost; maybe a blues band at the bar isn't that terrible; maybe New Age music has a purpose.
I'm just spit balling here because, for months, I recoiled from this record. The press sheet for Guilherme Goncalves' Coclea project cites Tangerine Dream, The Durutti Column, Six Organs of Admittance and Ash Ra Tempel as starting points for this dreamy guitar-based music — hey, that sounds pretty promising, right? However, at a glance, the first two tracks ("Touch" and "Mermaid's Theme") come off as a product demo of, say, a new Roland chorus pedal, or a kid at Guitar Center trying out a Stratocaster. Lush waves of gentle strumming on the same few riffs hit the listener ad nauseam with a few arpeggiated noodles sprinkled throughout. It isn't until you sit down with a calm mind (the music can certainly influence this, as it makes you feel drunk and melancholy like Jane's Addiction's "Then She Did..." does) that the experience is enjoyed; Cocleais not necessarily aiming for a climax, and that's okay.
The dynamic shifts are subtle, and the economy of each part is explored to the last, asking the listener for laser focus. On "Homem Dos Sonhos", Goncalves covers his baritone ostinato with a haunting, reverb-soaked vocal chorus, ending the track with a panning, equally cavernous pitch slide that comes off as a rocket crashing to earth. "Scorpio's Theme" is the most ambitious and relatively dissonant work here with Arabic scales, fluid wah-wah lines, buzzing UFO synths and bulbous clouds at the finale over a 6/8 loop. That track slides into "Love," a deceptively complicated orchestration of similar tone and background busyness that eventually passes away while hanging onto a single chord.
Again, this is nothing I would have sought out because my drive is to find something exotic, new and technically complicated. But Goncalves won me over with his calming, lovely and "just sit back and stop squirming" aesthetic.
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