An ambitious collection of three contemporary classical music CDs composed by Mireille Capelle, an actress, opera singer, and professor and director of the singing department at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent, there are hours of material here, often composed of bleak tones and atmospheric chimes. Although well-packaged and intellectually engaging, the music and project can be weighed down by a sense of abstraction and vagueness within some of its ideas.

The strength of these recordings comes through Capelle's creation of an expansive mood and the slowing down of the changes within her music so that the listener is able to focus on small, specific aspects of sounds, and is therefore in a sense able to become aware of the passage of time and the idea of passing time (the concept of time appearing to be the subject of the project).

Liner notes written by Belgian art collector, curator, and designer Axel Vervoodt mention that "[Capelle's music] symbolizes an osmosis with the universe" and "knowing that one will never reach ultimate knowledge," although I'm not sure what to make of these ideas on their own terms or in relation to the music itself. Similarly, Capelle writes that the pieces "are constructed geometrically according to a mathematical scheme which is based on the symbolism of numbers. On the basis of whatever drives my senses, I gather together a great mass of recorded sounds from everyday life: the street, the wind, streams, the noise of cars, of conversations, of birds, of singing... [and] I compose thematic phrases which are interpreted by musicians." The last idea seems to make more sense than the first, which seems overly complicated and confusing. As a subject time is a difficult, although, if properly approached, rewarding subject for art, but it is difficult to tell if Capelle's project matches up to its aims. Music is a temporal form and should be able to express ideas of time, but it is also such an abstract type of art and thought that it would be extremely difficult to express these concepts formally in any case, although the music here does seem to achieve an expression of this idea. One problem with Capelle's mathematical approach seems to be that, for her method to work, there would need to be an intrinsic connection between geometry and the symbolism of numbers, but this seems to be a value added between the two by Capelle. It is arguable, for example, that the "symbolism of numbers" is not particularly meaningful in itself. Aldous Huxley once described James Joyce as having an extremely problematic "magic view of words"--"an approach to words as having some intrinsic value apart from their references"--and it seems as though there is a similar problem here. 7/10 -- Jordan Anderson (28 July, 2010)