"Unseen of Mandos" is music for falling to sleep. Consequently, the style is slow, mellow, wandering, and deep. The sound lies in the background, below the surface, just out of reach. Like the random patter of rain or the whispers of the wind, the sound lingers here then there, with not enough substance on which the mind can focus, confounding the engine of consciousness, opening the doorway to slumber.
It begins with "A Time for reckoning". At last, the images of the day parade before the mind's eye, loosing their sequence, mixing there context, turning into nonsense. Consciousness is dissolving. "Little Star" waits just beyond the doorway in the space and time between the universes. Gradually a vast expanse of dream consciousness appears, a kind of "Azure Circle" on the boundary of an infinite plane. The inhabitants of the dream world float across the plane, the space illuminated by the inhabitants themselves, like fireflies in the distant evening. Somewhere in the depths of sleep, beyond consciousness, is the land which is "Unseen of Mandos," the deepest track of the collection. None may say what exists here, for none have remembered what they saw. The last track is "Distant City," whose shimmering lights entrance the eye for a space in time. The Distant City may be the onset of the lights of wakefulness.
Al Steffens creates original music in the genre of the deep space artists Steve Roach, Robert Rich, and Brian Eno. "Unseen of Mandos" was created as the result of a suggestion by fans to produce music with the explicit purpose of calming the mind and inducing sleep.
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