This latest album is astonishing even by the high standards I would have held Michael Begg to. Combining the normally distinct worlds of theology and thermodynamics, World Fair is a formidable work that rewards careful listening and engagement with the material. The heavy and daring philosophical musings are lifted by the stunning music created by Begg and his friends (including the return of Deryk Thomas to make Human Greed a duo once more). Altogether, they have made manifest an album of rare power that feels like it has years of epiphanies buried within it.
Following an extended instrumental prelude with all the usual hallmarks of Human Greed (rich textures and aching drones), a voice suddenly emerges from the gloom on "Waiting in a Car." Nicole Boitos (probably best known to Brainwashed readers as the artist responsible for the lamb on the cover of Human Greed’s previous album, Fortress Longing, and The Body Lovers among many other great works) reads the text that lives at the center of World Fair and sets its thesis out: the meeting of thermodynamics and divinity or at least treating thermodynamics as something that a person could have spiritual faith in. Boitos recites the words with a tempered delivery, both reverential and humane. Here, Begg nails his colors to the mast in what he is attempting to do; to approach the world of physics through the lens of theology.
Throughout the album, the thermodynamic concept of entropy (the tendency towards thermodynamic equilibrium; generally meaning towards a disordered state) and the related idea of heat death (the proposed final outcome of thermodynamics where the entropy of the universe reaches its absolute maximum). On the surface, these theories seem as far fetched as anything in theology and on the surface the language of physics lends itself to comparisons and metaphors with the singularity of the Big Bang becoming representative of many creation stories ("In the beginning was the Word," the idea that the word "Om" is the original vibration from which all else came, etc.) and the fiery images brought to mind from the phrase "Heat death" are all apocalyptic. Even the general understanding of entropy as a process away from the organization laid out at the beginning of the universe can easily be morphed into concepts of higher states, divine harmony and temptation towards destruction. Therefore, the text that appears again and again can be seen as much as a prayer as anything. On World Fair, Christ becomes Chrysler (the history of the motor car is fully entwined with the development of thermodynamics) and physics and metaphysics blur.
To underline the thermodivinic themes of the album, Begg sets a foot in the past as well as the present, drawing as much on Thomas Tallis and John Taverner and early Georgian chant as he does on contemporary musical techniques and styles. This feeds deeper into the metaphor at the heart of the album. Begg’s assimilation of these early musics in the same way energy is transferred from one form to another (even the word "metaphor" itself carries thermodynamic baggage, coming from the Greek meaning "to transfer"). These feelings explored by those long dead cannot be destroyed, they just take on new forms (and maybe the same can be said for the feelings that first gave rise to religion becoming transferred to a scientific understanding of the universe).
As the rich and melancholic elegance of the music of the 1500s resonates profoundly through World Fair, its effect is intensified by the sounds of church bells and birds coming together to create a calming sense of nature, acting as a medium to explore a time before the city as a dominating force existed.To take this further, one of the album’s most poignant moments comes during "From Olden Disks" via a recording of a man with a thick southern United States accent talking about walking out to the woods to experience the purest feeling of peace. His genuine awe at the restorative potential of being alone in nature is truly moving. This well-trodden metaphor of nature as salve for the soul becomes magnified as World Fair goes on, the cataclysmic finale of heat death instead becomes more faithful to its proper, mathematical meaning as everything reaches a state of equilibrium and quantum nirvana is achieved.
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