Daniel Robert Lahey
“Epiphany Counterfeit”
This release starts with the serene, floating Given Time. This work is brooding at times, filled with internal tensions and conflict. It has the feeling of the internal struggle that we go through with our own mortality, that relationship with time that we cannot escape and yet we have a feeling of want or need to understand, a desire to bargain with it to understand our lives and our desires better.
Daniel has a penchant for offering pieces with titles that are puns, and Present Tents is no exception. At first it seems to be an odd title, is it a play on the military phrase “present arms”? or maybe it’s a reference to camping equipment. And, then there is the play on the phrase “present tense”, in which case it could be a reference to current tension, or a reference to grammar. Based on the context of the work, I would think that it is a play on the grammatical construction, but then again, maybe Daniel has a fondness for camping gear that he hasn’t told me about.
The third track is the main focus of this release. It’s a reminder that sometimes things we think, or things that we are lead to believe can be false. On one level it’s an interesting struggle that artists go through actually working to build knowledge, and to find a perspective on that knowledge to be able to communicate it in another form. It’s almost a disaster to realize that the knowledge that has been built is not accurate, it’s false, and potentially destroys the work(s) one has built around them.
The final piece of this release is a another playful title from Daniel, Quatre Morceaux, can be a reference to this release (which contains four pieces), or it could be a reference to the work itself being comprised of four pieces. Either way it’s a very fitting way to close out Epiphany Counterfeit.
