It feels shallow to write about music. It may as well be 1956 with the rampant resurgence of McCarthyism and xenophobia that seems to inhabit our terrorism cold war. And that incoming icy fog, where civil and human rights take a backseat to fear and irrationality can’t be ignored. Music can no longer be viewed as escape, and for all your Beyonce and Kanye tweets, neither are Bob Dylan, or Pete Seeger, or Phil Ochs. But we don’t need words, rather gestures; assurances that though history is repeating and we all feel trapped once more by the old white men who cling to their guns and their oil and their money, that perhaps we can take two more steps forward and no steps back this time. That perhaps we learned from the first shots fired against freedom that rang out in Dallas nearly 50 years ago; that Baton Rouge and Minneapolis and Baltimore and Cleveland don’t become another Montgomery or Little Rock. Colourless, the latest creation from Tokyo musician Rhucle, feels—not as distraction, but reaction. A person who is thousands of miles away from the rankle and rancor of current day America and yet, so wisely tied to its undercurrent. Colourless is not quite a claim on a worldview, nor about how black and white we’ve let these issues that are boiling hard at the surface become. But the wordless, glacial moving album seems to mimic the frozen-in-time emotions of America. The paranoia, the fear, the consternation of a nation divided against itself. We’re a nation that has to forcibly move each other into the next era of progression and it seems the grandparents and parents of the current generations failed. They applied a bandage with no adhesive. The wounds of old were just covered up, but never given the proper attention to heal. And once again, these guardians of generations past have elected people too afraid to steer directly into action. But unlike a youthful generation 25 years ago that bought and sold boredom as rebellion, a younger class of citizens aren’t giving into that fear of failure, because they seem to know that we must fail over and over (and over…) to finally yield some long-term benefit. Colourless works in the same way. On its surface, how it differentiates itself from other ambient dronescapes is hard to recognize. Yet with many more listens, it begins to show itself as something progressive; a work of art slowly moving us all forward by moving a sound with it. And though it’s hard to concentrate on just the sound of Colourless without the white noise of the world seeping in, take solace in knowing that it will ultimately not serve as a distraction, but as a balm for a gashed nation — and honestly, world — that is juggling multiple struggles of consciousness. This time, let’s take positive change all the way to completion, and though there are no well-spun turns of phrases and allegory, Rhucle certainly provides a calming soundtrack to positive change.
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