Like past
Shea releases, his 1997 Sub Rosa release
Satyricon takes its creative impetus from literature (this time from ancient Roman author Petronius' work of the same name). Unlike past
Shea releases, however, there are next to no samples in this nearly hour-long work,
Shea instead assembling the remote contributions of nearly two dozen musicians (Sim Cain,
Anthony Coleman,
Zeena Parkins, Sebastian Steinberg, Fabio Accurso, and
Erik Friedlander, among others) into abstract instrumental ambient and electro-acoustic pieces incorporating the sparse tropics of techno and jungle as often as Western classical and Eastern traditional musics. Since
Shea mostly limits his source material to discrete performances,
Satyricon is a far more minimal affair compared with earlier releases such as Tower of Mirrors or Hsi-Yu Chi, but since those works tended at times toward the over-dense, the imposition is advantageous, resulting in an overall more approachable album. ~ Sean Cooper