Mr Lubomir Terziev, who teaches literature and creative writing at the American University in Bulgaria, has written a review of Rays that Heal which I find interesting and illuminating. Here it is:
Do these rays heal?
As a form of artistic expression, minimalism relies on one of the following effects:
a) the “less is more” technique leaves the reader/viewer/listener with enough space for interpretation. Think of Lydia Davis’ flash fiction hiatuses or Giya Kancheli’s unexpected silences. As one of my favourite lit teachers used to say, such works of art “begin when they end.”
b) repetition invites the reader’s/viewer’s/listener’s mind to actively pursue the signs of difference in the sameness established by, say, that several-minute-long shot with the rain refracting the neon light in the background in Bela Tar’s Damnation. Ditto the solid, mural-like soundscape of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna. Such works of art are designed, I think, to never begin and never end.
Alexander Kyd’s minimalistic composition “Rays that Heal” seeks to constitute itself in the space of repetition. It is always an elusive space, but what makes it particularly precarious in this case is that it hangs between two identifications. On the one hand, the gentle and unruffled riffs of Kyd’s guitar, which recall the serenity of Baroque composers like Corelli, could lull the listener into perceiving this piece as yet another composition that adds to the overwhelmingly vast and underwhelmingly predictable “music for meditation and relaxation” category on YouTube. There is no daring experimentation with harmony here, and the listener’s spirit is left, as it were, to frolic in subtly melancholic delight. Hence, the healing.
A second, more careful listening yields a different vista. There is a tension between repetition and variation in Rays which stimulates the mind to discover the less than comforting dimension of this music. The dialogue between the guitar in the foreground and the orchestral echo in the background reminded me of Deleuze’s astute observation that “variation is not added to repetition in order to hide it, but is rather its condition or constitutive element, the interiority of repetition.” It is this inherently dynamic dimension of repetition that I’d rather take away from Rays. I can use some healing, but I’d rather be healed by failing to identify with an origin and a closure.
Give me repetition anytime.
Alexander Kyd 