In the Land of Far Beyond
Notes of appreciation...
In 2018 Bill Nelson released a triple-album, Auditoria, celebrating his 70th birthday. (If memory serves, he’d previously planned a project titled Grand Auditoria. I assume, but don’t know for sure, that Auditoria evolved from that?). Physically, it’s a thing of beauty – otherworldly abstract designs (by Bill) in deep blues, a matt-finish boxset digipak artwork-artifact. Of the three discs, Mysterium (disc 2) initially captured my attention - Alone in a Lunar Light, Back of Beyond, Who’s That Floating Above the Trees - to name a handful of the indisputably sublime tracks.
But Auditoria is one of those works that takes time to appreciate. And in fact not all fans were totally enthusiastic on its release. But we know better by now, hopefully... right?
I revisited Mysterium, and it blew me away again (as I mentioned in a previous post). Now been relistening to discs 1 and 3 – These Stars are Fire and Plus Ultra – and they really come alive, as if the music has been cohering in my subsconscious all this time. You’ve gotta spend some time with these albums! May I recommend, for starters, In the Land of Far Beyond (from Plus Ultra).
And, by the way, when is BN going to get his due recognition from the music mags and critics as undisputed world master of the E-bow, and for the unique musical universe he’s created with that instrument of emotion-expressed-in-electricity? At this point it’s not even something that someone could argue against and be taken seriously!
(Trivia: curiously, Auditoria isn't mentioned at all on Bill's main wikipedia page, although of course it's listed on his full discography wiki. I assume the reason for this omission is that the 'Selected solo discography' on his main page is kept quite short. Still...)
A simple response here is that you are totally correct! I haven't done justice to this set. Rediscovering it yesterday (and thanks for that), apart from anything else, it is a lovely package to hold and explore.
The music on the three discs is peculiar in that while the three are very clearly different from each other, they also somehow really belong together. Not sure how that works, but it definitely does!