Going in, I knew nothing about Apashe or his music, and only had a passing familiarity with electro and trap outside of the 1x per year Positiv Festival at the 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater in Orange. What immediately impressed me was the audacity of the composition itself: electronic music and enormous bass arranged for a full philharmonic orchestra. I admittedly had to look up beforehand what "philharmonic" actually means. As it turns out, there is essentially no structural difference between a philharmonic and a symphony orchestra. Both generally use the same families of instruments and can involve somewhere around 80 to 100 musicians. There seemed to be about that many on stage, dressed in black robes with their hoods up, surrounded by strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion. The whole thing already had the feeling of some strange ceremony. But as impressive as the sound was, what really stayed with me were the images and motion graphics projected and mapped onto the ancient Roman wall behind the stage. I'd never seen these techniques used quite this way. The imagery seemed to draw from antiquity, Gothic art, religious iconography, empire, exploration and historical catastrophe, but filtered through something much darker. Set against the bass and orchestra, it felt like we were being dragged through the darker recesses of human psychology, the same inscrutable energies that drove people to cross oceans, conquer new lands, slaughter one another for resources, build empires and burn them down again. And the imagery itself was constantly mutating. Statues and artifacts appeared to have been captured in 3D through scans or photogrammetry, then fractured, split apart and reassembled. Blood gushed through monumental forms. Fierce old paintings suddenly filled the entire Roman wall. Ships pushed violently through black seas. At one point a vessel bearing a Dutch flag seemed to charge endlessly forward. It was cinematic, but not exactly cinema. Watching it, I had the strange feeling that I was encountering some new form of cinema, one in which architecture, music, historical imagery and motion graphics had replaced the screen and narrative. So I wasn't particularly surprised when I later came across Apashe saying:
"I'm drawn to composing things that sound like the theme song for the bad guy in a movie."
For 90 minutes, that is almost exactly what it felt like. Except the "bad guy" wasn't really a character. It felt as though we were following, scene by scene, something much older and harder to name: the violent, creative, insatiable energy that has carried humanity through millennia. The same energy that appears again and again in mythology and the Bible, in stories of kings, conquest, exile, apocalypse and rebirth. The same thing Melville finds in Captain Ahab, where an almost superhuman will to push forward, discover, possess and overcome finally becomes indistinguishable from self-destruction. Maybe that's what I found so compelling about the performance. It wasn't simply that the visuals illustrated the music. For a little while, the music, images, architecture and history seemed to become one thing. And projecting all of this onto a Roman theater that has itself survived two thousand years of human ambition, violence, religion, empire and collapse made the whole thing feel strangely complete.
