Paradise Lost Language Analysis

Commentary on Paradise Lost album

Duration: 77 Minutes

2016-2017

Introduction

Paradise Lost is an album formed of eighteen compositions of varying stylistic qualities that coheres around a story. It is a work aiming to evoke a cinematic sensation and an immersive experience by bringing storytelling, artwork, lyrics, and the music for the listener to trace out the underlying meaning and the world that I have created. With the amount of detail went in to the production of the album, I seek to challenge the common perception of a music album, that of a mere collection of songs, and present it as a new contemporary art form in which storytelling and other art forms are blended to make larger statements. This concern informs the majority of my

Take away the visual element of any film and we realise that a remarkable amount of information still communicates to us through sound. Apart from the dialogues and other familiar sounds, we can identify through spatial panning, the position of the sound source; we can assess the whereabouts of the scene by listening the background noises, and if it is a room, we can even vaguely make out the size and nature of the room through its reverberation. In light of this, I have employed a similar thinking at parts of the album to make use of the intrinsic audio-visual relationship of the brain. These parts will be referred to as ‘audio scenes’ and are aiming to conjure visual imagery, or a

I wanted to create a story based on a journey with mythological and psychological underpinnings told through science fiction. Upon looking for inspiration, I came across the work of American writer Joseph Campbell and his comparative mythology book “The hero with a thousand faces”. One of the core themes of Campbells book is the argument that all humanity is linked by certain universalities. He supports his case by cross examining various ancient mythical stories, fairy tales, fiction and even biblical writings of different cultures and outlines an underlying link. In his own words, these findings are summarised as