Innocence is the debut collab EP from composer Isaac Benjamin (aka No Audible Dialogue) and Jabril Berry (aka Pardus Blacke). Isaac Benjamin, grew up on the West Coast and has been a musician since he was thirteen, starting with the guitar. However he got into Producing after a 30ft fall in August of 09‘ shattered his wrist, which meant no guitar playing! Computers and Digital Audio workstations were a logical choice thereafter, and he says he has never looked backed since.
Isaac now spends his days composing for indie game developers and film makers. While in his spare time he develops his own video games, and composes music. “The Innocence” EP was something his always wanted to do. Isaac says he loves sorrowful orchestral music: “Songs that make people feel something cathartic when they listen to them are some of my favorite kind of songs.
Jabril is also from Southern California. He has been practicing music since he was in middle school. He started with guitar as well. Currently Jabril works as a Roadie setting up equipment for a band in Savannah GA. He also freelances composing music for various media.
Together Isaac and Jabril have delivered “Innocence”. A 3-track EP, consisting of the movements (or tracks), “Innocence”, Tainted Innocence” and “Innocence Sustained”.
Ambient, Glitch or Techno music – when broadly defined as music derived from modern technology – ages about as well as any other specimen of the computer industry. What sounded fresh and futuristic a couple of years ago now strike ears as tone-dated and often obsolete by the rampant revolutions of the DAW-industry. Only a few songs, and a few artists, transcend the narrowly-set parameters of electronic music in terms of construction and overall lasting appeal: indeed, if anything, the set structure by which electronica is crafted – the standard build-up-climax-breakdown – practically ensure that, fundamentally, what’s on offer now is the same as that has been on offer years before, with only the technology of production itself having improved.
But, as I mentioned, a few artists do break the mold, composing music that is both challenging and genre-defying, timeless, and consistently adventurous to willing ears. Electronic music that sounds like organic orchestral arrangements, designed for headphones rather than dance floors: Isaac Benjamin and Jabril Berry are surely part of these.
“The Innocence” EP can be viewed as an ambient adventure. As favored by Isaac Benjamin, sorrow and rumination dominate the EP, and even Jabril’s glitchy remix ‘Tainted Innocence’ is underlined by a melancholic impression – but it is all masterfully composed: intricate, beautiful, challenging and timeless, like few others of the genre.
Primarily dominated by pianos and supported by synth-strings, the songs on the EP make you listen to them several times to understand what is hidden behind the notes you hear. With deep concentration, it takes you to other dimensions where you’ve never been to before (deep inside you feel like you know them). Listening closely to “Innocence”, you’ll understand what Isaac and Jabril’s music is all about: Simple, yet powerful composition of sounds that has its own beautiful melancholic melody and almost hidden rhythm, that is so hard to find anywhere else in modern electronically induced music.
“The Innocence” encapsulates the ‘sorrowful’ theme very well; the music is gentle but haunting and otherworldly, distanced, yet at the same time extremely beautiful and highly dramatic. I can hardly believe that this music is ‘machine-made’!
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