Everything leading up to Close to the Edge in immersive music was practice so this record could get the treatment it so richly deserves. And it did. Brilliant! Kudos to Yes for the music of a lifetime and to Steven Wilson for transforming it into the form it always wanted to be.
As a kid my first immersive experience was taking the two detachable speakers off the cheap AM/FM cassette turntable box and putting one on each side of my pillow. I took many trips Close to the Edge and to Xanadu and to the Dark Side of the Moon. I felt the idea of immersive music as these great bands took me floating away in the wonderful soundscapes they created. Headphones had a similar effect and were great for hearing detail but never the same for me as a full wave of music enveloping me.
Decades later when surround came around the chance to re-experience those same things was an amazing breakthrough. Now the instruments and vocals have room to breathe and space to spread out and instead of a wall of sound you got a circle of sound and it was brilliant.
But Atmos is the logical outcome of this sonic progression. Sound from all around. And once that became the standard there were some records that just screamed for that treatment and Close to the Edge is by far my top selection. Xanadu from Rush was a worthy predecessor and it was wonderful, but CTTE has so much to offer and now it has been delivered.
When you climb onto your Floating Island courtesy of Roger Dean to take this journey, you know you are going to a magical world. The trip you take in Atmos sends you along passing other floating islands with guitarists on them or vocalists, the occasional percussionist and they are all around you, left, right and most definitely above.
The weak spot for me in most every Atmos mix until this one was what seemed like a hesitancy to use the height speakers as an equal partner to the ground surrounds. This is understandable for a couple reasons, one is that music coming from overhead is just not something we’re used to. Some albums have had atmospheric elements but most were not truly immersively constructed. The second is that in most home Atmos systems the height speakers are the weak point.
Anyone with high quality fronts (and surrounds) especially full-sized ones is hard pressed to put a matching capability up in/on the ceiling. So smaller and lesser speakers make do or up firing floor speakers do the job with reflection. The mix engineers know this and at some level have accounted for that by not relying on the heights as an equal force. I bit the bullet and put Martin Logan Sistines in my ceiling and today that choice was vindicated.
Steven Wilson said Screw That as far as babying the heights with less use. This music demands to be full enveloping and a lot of it belongs up above. So he put it there and we benefit from that. Now as our islands float along, sometimes we travel through a cave with shimmering waves of sound emanating from the roof. Other times heavenly voices or soaring keyboard swirls or guitar fireworks come from all around. But the overall musical soundscape becomes more coherent because of this not confused or distracting.
The sounds belong well spread out and there are so many of them this is the only way to give them all the space they need to expand. There was always a massive amount of activity in this record, and before it took major effort to separate and hear the different components — almost too much concentration finding individual elements to enjoy the whole effect.
Well Now you get it ALL! And it is beautiful. While there is occasional movement of instruments around the room mostly they just sit suspended in space on their own floating island happily blending into the sound/landscape of the world we have been transported to. When there are effects such as lightning bolt keyboard strikes or glistening arpeggios they make sense and the movement adds to the effect the sounds always had in the overall mix.
I’m sure I could find some nits to pick but why? I have never been given such a perfect representation of what the music was in my mind actually translated into a fully functional pleasure dome. Time for another listen.
