There is a cinematic quality to the ambient exercises on ?Poesis Athesis,? which means that this is a record that is moody and sublte here, pretentious and suitable-for- background-only there. That is appropriate, since these tracks were written for a video series by Chi Kung Master Terrence Dunn. Without the context of the images for which the music was written, many tracks lack power and purpose. In the context of a meditative instructional video, these songs may have had a contemplative resonance. Maybe it was hard to edit down the almost ten hours of music Thompson wrote for the project into a representative sample, but as it stands few of these tracks stand alone as memorable.

Repetition and silence are keys to a lot of ambient music, yet most are not recorded to be incidental music for other projects. Here the tunes just amble along, waiting for visuals to be provided. There is no emotional investment inspired by these, and many of the titles??Paradigm as Supergenre???make you feel less like investing and more running away from self-important drivel.

The point is that nothing happens, and I?m sure that was not the point of the composition. ?Poesis Athesis? is hardly poetic; it would be interesting to see how successful these pieces were in the films. They certainly do not inspire many images in the weary listener. 5/10 -- Mike Wood (3 September, 2008)