influenced

By Dan Brown

Reviewed by Klaus Schaefter, Aperion Press

I have to admit that the day I received my copy of Dan Brown’s Influenced album, I was not in any mood to review that, or any other album. My dog had just chewed up my favorite pair of shoes, but not until after he decided to leave an enormous pile of number two in my kitchen. I suppose he wanted me to know that he felt he was being taken for granted. Of course it was my own fault. On top of that, my car overheated in the middle of rush hour and I had to be towed by a tow truck driver with a serious, and I do mean serious, gas problem. Anyway, my editor insisted that I review this album, and I am not in any financial position to battle with my editor in chief, so I reluctantly did what he asked. “You may like it,” he told me.

Now I am quite familiar with the music of this enigmatic man, having heard some of it during my college years. Some of the bootleg material from Brown’s early career I first owned on cassette tape long before the digital age. The dichotomy in this early music could easily be understood with a side by side comparison between his experimental piece “Underwater Life,” and the stark contrast to his eclectic, if somewhat puerile, “Another Frog on the Fire.” Brown’s life took a similar serpentine course, and he entered the business world to supplement his growing musical career. But suddenly, at the moment of his greatest opportunity, a multi-year deal with Decca and the chance to realize his Rock epic “Achieve,” Brown dropped out of sight. Rumors spread like venereal disease in a college dorm after Homecoming. Some said that he had moved to Tibet. Others claimed that he was studying achromatic tonality and micro-tonal tuning with the clandestine Sufi Master Zeno of Antwerp. One rumor even had him relocating to Kansas for heaven’s sake! We now know that this was in fact true. But behind the scenes Brown was thinking. Brown was planning, and Brown was preparing his life for his monumental musical opus that would transform the very nomenclature of Progressive Music. Like Newton before him, Brown needed a new language; a calculus of musical nomenclature that could describe what was soon to follow - “The Saint.”

Dan Brown had journeyed inward. Nothing remained of his earlier satire and tongue in cheek playfulness from his “Studio Lenexa” period. The songs on this album became decidedly somber in tone, melancholy, languid, and refined to an almost austere minimalism. Dan Brown had changed.

His next album which is what I will now attempt to review, was a bold step into what I can only call ambiance. “Influenced” is at once a poignant album even as it attempts to resurrect some of the progressive spirits that were exorcised years earlier. These songs are as light as a summer breeze and as tender as the touch of a baby. These songs are not an afterthought; they are forethought in motion. It is marvelous from the very beginning song “Dragon”, and it is clear that this music represents a synthesis of the two creative demons that form a strangely beautiful dichotomy. Similar to “The Saint”, Dan Brown took the daring step of fusing some of the musical motifs embodied in his experimental work. Most notably, the core theme of “Underwater Life” is carefully threaded throughout much of this album, and some of the synthesis is surprising and interesting in the way surprises always point to further surprises.

“Dragon” is ambient without being pretentious and boring. This is an obvious integration and sublimation of his early ambient works from the “Hermit” and “Lenexa” period, and I found it most refreshing. The “Hermit” days, long considered the lost years of Brown’s music career, nevertheless were the catalyst that he would use to forge his more dynamic period which later became known as his “Faustian” period. Typified by bold clashes with dynamics and chromatic liberalism, a period ironically that he chose to cut off his gnarly Afro haircut and step into the social fold of Midwestern conservatism.

Track 2, “Shimmer”, is appropriately named. Not true that this piece was originally commissioned as a soundtrack for a pornographic movie of the same title. That was one of the main reasons Brown decided to obtain his Master’s Degree in Hypoallergenic Sarcasm as something to fall back on, to avoid polluting his music in the usual way that aging rock stars and sagging divas have always done. The piece sways like a Brazilian lounge singer, and at times I can almost hear the whoosh of her dress as she coos an intoxicated crowd of businessmen and women on leave from life.

Track 3, “Untitled”, was a bit of a mystery, but with a little digging into Brown’s biography a careful reporter can piece together the fragments that Brown tries so innocently to hide. Namely, an expression of his deep philosophical belief in redemption and the obvious extrapolation that a thing not named is a thing with indefinite potential to produce emotional friction. This hint at such an obvious Dadaist treatment, however antiquated, is still pertinent in the modern culture that Brown tries to provoke.

“My Epiphany” is juxtaposed across this vast spectrum of opposing motifs in sharp relief, possibly to delineate the contrasting themes for those unfamiliar with the musical territory mapped out by Brown, and it is a joy to listen to even without the knowledge of his artistic tomfoolery. The actual lyrics are probably just something that he came up with on the spot to make the impression seem even more organized than it actually is and to evoke an elevated feeling of visceral optimism. Possibly it has to do with a technique used by Hesse in his literary novel “Demian”. I love it! Brown’s voice is articulate and clean. The lyrics at first remind one of the Jimi Hendrix song “Purple Haze”; but Brown goes much deeper than Hendrix would have known. To this reviewer, the subtle Hessian quality to the lyrics left me content. And the music is just a recapitulation of his major theme, expressed diatonically. Nice job Mr. Brown.

The final song, “On the Road,” is a song of hope and expresses beautifully the concept of movement. It is my personal favorite. Once again, Brown works his musical alchemy using the familiar two-part harmony structure. The right channel sounds like an old analogue Farfisa synth, a vestige from the seventies, and on the left channel we hear a slightly de-tuned guitar synthesizer. Brown trades off riffs between instruments all the while keeping the main melody line distinctly on the right channel, and it is easy to hear his expertise on the keyboard on this song. And I love the magnificent ascending triplets in presstissimo. This is rare Brown, or properly Brown at his rarest as it now seems that he is once again testing the waters, and hopefully if they are not too tepid, Brown will once again jump in and return to his days of “The Hermit of Mink Lenexa”.

Listening to this album made me forget that I still had to clean up a pile of crap in my kitchen, and that is a personal testament to this album. I have always loved Dan Brown’s music, so this was just more frosting on the musical cake that Brown has served up over the many years that I have listened to him. And as I have matured over the years and as the world has matured and become less tolerant, Brown has also matured and matriculated into a serious composer. Truly his music can still speak to those whose ears have not been damaged by the persistent cacophony of noise and gutteral moaning of a society in apoplectic seizure. Maybe that will turn out to be the legacy of Brown’s music, a statement that it spoke in a language that did not need to be shouted and screamed and howled from the rooftops to be appreciated.