
Already in the first track, the dense, epic and monumental The concept of sinking, we clearly see that the artist — deliberately or not — establishes his creative efforts towards a prominently dark ambient musical cosmogony. With pulsating, almost afflictive sonorous reverberations, the sensitive pluralism that emanates from the expansive and digressive agonies that subtlety comes out of these tracks certainly makes this album one of the darkest in the artist's discography.
Nevertheless, there is also a lighter side in the music — albeit ostensibly dispersive —, that sounds as a more discreet, reasonable, proverbial uneasiness allocated in the background, that ocasionally flirts with our projective sensibilities, gracefully establishing an harmonious pattern that can be as decisively obscure as it is delightfully stimulating.
The music gradually reveals itself as it is: as complex — in the darker depths of its relentless and dissolute darkness —, as it is majestically simple and objective, in the way it calmly delivers its pungent and uneventful dimension of poingnant mortality smoothly to the listener. Just as impressive is Hans' remarkable ability to progressively reinvent his music with more diluted elements, while never losing his virtuous and graceful sonorous identity.
With the conception of an exceedingly dense, cohesive and robust musical atmosphere, it looks like Hans Castrup has crafted The world is all that is... as a pervasive parallel dimension destitute of acessible colorful sensibilities, whose mandatory elements are all indebted to a relentless and abrasive sonorous tissue, made entirely of an unforgiving, infinite and ruthless demise.
As the perfect sonorous background for a surreal hallucinatory black and white alternate reality — like the ones shown in old sixties television anthology series like The Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond —, the music conceived on this marvelous album by Hans Castrup transports us to a whole different, more diluted, arbitrary and conspicuous diagram of existence, where the fugacious ephemeralities of life seems dormant, because they were never what they seemed to be, in the first place.
Your sensitivities will be all confused, before they would be entirely configured in a completely different sonorous perception, diametrically opposite to what you had expected. In the end, The world is all that is... is a fantastic descent into a world of gloom, solitude and demise, without any possibilities to return.
Wagner