 pomenik
Neznanom Umetniku (eng: Monument
to an unknown artist) is the fifth and a half album of
dark-electro project ALONE
from Belgrade.
pro CDr | colour booklet
with lyrics | 50 min approx.
Recorded 2008-2010 in "Vitebsk 1920" studio, released in December 2010.
Strangely
light and romantic, inspired by an undiscovered heritige of the new
wave, and by the social-abstract monuments of the former Yugoslavia.
1. CELESTIAL
2. BLUE BEAM
3. ALTRUIZAM ANONIME
4. THE NAMELESS KIND
5. AN UNREAD NOTE
6. NEMUŠTA PESMA
7. NIJE KRAJ
8. MONUMENT OF AN UNKNOWN
ARTIST
9. [untitled]
10. AWAY
As a new year's present, and a visual
addendum to the album, Alone gives you the
gallery of 12 landscapes for your desktop - the 'monumental' calendar
for 1963 and 1983 [compatible with 2011] in classic and widescreen
formats:
Worldwide customers can order the album from tutrur.com.
Serbian customers can order the album via this mail: 
Alone would like to thank his friends who participated in the
recordings:
Tina and Dunja Milošević
- vocals on Blue
Beam
Igor Petrušić -
vocals on Altruizam
Anonime
Andrej Vojković -
bass on An Unread
Note
Aleka - "Poreklo nepoznato"
Nikola Cakić -
engineering on An Unread
Note
The author agreed to
enlighten us on some key aspects of the album, in the following text:
ALONE:
APOLOGIA OF THE NEW ALBUM
VANITYS DISCLAIMER
-
“This is not a return, this is a departure towards the unknown”
These were the words which concluded the previous, fifth Alone album, Aeon wave
from 2007, stranger than all Alone’s previous albums. If someone has
noticed this promise and, perhaps, still remembers it, he will probably
be
surprised with the new album. Instead of setting course for yet even
deeper cosmos from the point at which Aeon
wave arrived, the album Spomenik
neznanom umetniku (eng: Monument
to an unknown artist) turned out to be kind of... romantic!? And
even
- light.
Whatever happened to the ‘departure towards the unknown’?
I assure you, there’s no need to panic, the pilot of our ship still
decidedly leads our expedition towards the outer limits of the known
space. By now, we would have probably found ourselves
in that unknown
place, on the sixth album... if only we hadn’t felt the
sudden urge for one unexpected, ‘fifth and a half’ album along the way, pictured as a
short excursion into - pure sentimentality.
The catalyst for this unexpected ‘sentimental deviation’ was
discovery of the countless obscure musical projects from the new wave
era.
Fascinated, bewildered and inspired by the inexhaustibility of the
undiscovered treasure of DIY and cassette culture of the 80s, I felt
once again an old passion - opposed to my usual grandiose artistic
ambitions
- the passion for easy and simple creativity, direct and modest, even
naive and childish. However, every time I would try to give in to this
rejuvenating desire for simplicity, I would be stopped by my grandiose
vanity, which hardly ever allows me the coziness of creating modest and
sentimental work. Fortunately, I have been able to outwit it with a
trick question: can there be a greater challenge for a megalomaniac
than - a simple work?
Vanity had no other option but to let me do what I want. Even vanity
admits that the man who publishes all his works, from the
greatest to the most miserable ones, is more honorable than the man who
makes a rigid selection of his works, and commits self-censorship in an
attempt to impress us with his “genius”. If works of art are moldings
of the soul as much as of the intellect, they need to be more than just
well thought-out. They need to be heartfelt.
Hence - the unexpected sentimental in-between-album. :)
A MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE
At first conceived as a homage to anonymous artists
whose works have never been, nor will ever be discovered, the
spontaneously developing album further widened its main theme into the
thought of the metaphysical impossibility of any contact whatsoever.
The songs on the album are lost in ether, between souls and their
worlds, handwritten ballads sent out in bottles, with no recipient
specified. Here, the anonymity and the obscurity of the author or the
message are not the only essential things anymore, but so are the
obscurity of the recipient, or the unlikeliness of the communication
between two worlds, two desert planets, two persons. All we really have
is just a bare hope that we will stumble upon someone in the night, a
hope so reminiscent of the lost destinies of the new wave, forgotten
cassettes which come into our hands today, like bottled messages, from
who knows where.
Here I must underline that the longing, apparent in Alone’s bottled
messages, is much wider than the longing of love. Songs on the new
album are primarily odes of longing for the new horizon, for the new
experience, for an escape from the wasteland, and more than anything -
odes of longing for the wondrous. The hypnotic sense of attraction to
all things which are neither pretty, nor ugly, nor even clear at all,
but are - entirely alien, just like a postcard from out of this world,
which rouses our encouraging premonition that other, utterly different
worlds can be discovered.
At the mystic peaks of alienation, when we sense how everything,
absolutely everything turns alien and absurd, that sense might destroy
us... but it can also save us. For, at the moment when our world looses
all meaning, we find ourselves in a new, unknown reality, rich with an
inexhaustible plenty of the alien and - the wondrous. The character of
that liberating experience is nothing short of religious and, in
ecstasy of our newly acquired incomprehansion, we begin to admire and
to bow to the supreme artist, whose very essence we define as ‘the strangeness’ and, literally, we
begin to worship everything we don’t
understand.
ORIGIN: UNKNOWN
In his strivings for the wondrous, and strivings to
address his creator, his loved ones, the dead and the unborn, man made
equally wondrous monuments. Those epic concrete moldings of the
intellect and the soul, more eternal than any creator, aren’t they
after all the border stones between the worlds? Sometimes, when we see
their abstract bodies stabbed into our landscape, they will seem like
only the furthest extremities of the structures whose titan dimensions
could not fit into the cosmos they belong to.
However, the spirit which has been chiseled into the monument hasn’t
been kept imprisoned inside it. Because the monument is not just the
stone, it’s the whole occupying landscape. The spirit in the stone
becomes an additional function of the natural influence by which
landscapes shape our inner spaces. Basically, the monuments are ‘the
transmitters’, and the nature is ‘the amplifier’ of the spirit, in time
and space. Many people who grew up in the shadows of social-abstract
monuments of old Yugoslavia know what I am talking about here.
Archetypical as much as futuristic, those megaliths were nothing else
but the emotional foundations for construction of the new spirit,
required as a spiritual basis for the then forthcoming ideology.
Nowadays, after the winds have blown away even the memory of the
ideology [what was it called, anyway? who knows, who cares...], the
spirit of the monument is even stronger and clearer: epic, heroic, but
also cosmic and - alien. Left on their own, alone in the nature,
monuments live their eternal lives like homunculi who were set free
from
some unfinished experiment. Their spirit is what inspired the vision of
my album - the nature inhabited only by anonymous spirits turned to
giant stones.
So, here’s another archeological piece of music, another splinter of
some spirit, born-and-buried under layers of infosphere, for some
unknown future explorers...
That is, unless the layers somehow fossilize themselves into one
universal layer of information fertilizer for the future creations.
Hey, that doesn’t sound that bad, either!
Oh, and also, if you’re picking music to spend the rest of your life
with on a desert planet, well... this modest album probably won’t be
enough for you.
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