Generating emotion through the medium of sound. That should surely be the aim of any musician with the intention of still being part of tomorrow’s sunrise. There are, of course, many ways of making that happen and tellKujira have, with their album “La Lucha Es un Poema Colectivo”, taken an almost intellectual route to their solution.
The textures of the ambient genre, the soundbites, the captures from the soundtrack of reality as indeed there yet there is also a focus, whilst perhaps not immediately apparent, on getting from start to finish and these four songs, whilst devoid of any lyrical content, move forever forwards as if to take the listener on a journey to somewhere or nowhere like, perhaps, listening to the soundtrack of an arthouse movie that you will never see.
Whilst the structure may therefore not be entirely that of conventionality, there is still something of a neoclassical structure to all that you hear with the fragments of the real world that tellKujira graciously allow to intervene in their musical adventure finding a comfortable home in their neverland of viola, cello and guitar. The end has a tendency to justify the means in such matters and, with an obvious musical literacy and technical fluency working in their favour, it takes little effort on the part of the attentive listener to fall under the sort of enchantment that could never be the child of the machine.
I am sure that mainstream listeners will let this album pass them by yet connoisseurs of music that needs more than three minutes to attain focus may find themselves driven to ingest these four songs as a sort of sustenance for their impoverished souls.