An audience with a fervid imagination is an artist's most helpful aid. Debbie Parsons (aka Foehn) will call upon your cortex to speed her third album onto success. Hidden Cinema Soundtracks is dependent on your willingness to pay attention to this album's 28 tracks in order to give form and life to titles such as "We Tear at Each Other's Hearts," "So Full Up On Emptiness," and, most elusively, "Someone."

Behind the titles are waves of feedback (appropriated from Parson's time in Third Eye Foundation), muted beats, Dictaphone recordings of street ambiance, and daring honesty. Parsons imbues each brief track with a disregard for artifice and disingenuousness; these songs aren't lessons in the use of ProTools, or a bald display of beat programming. Parsons delivers her world view in the same way that Rothko delivered his. Hidden Cinema Soundtracks isn't one of those albums that relies on the hackneyed conceit of being a "soundtrack for an unrealized film." As Hidden Cinema Soundtracks plays, you're looking at Parson's frame of reference. And what a melancholy, depressed outlook it is.

The sampled dialog speaks of the impossibility and improbably of life. Parsons questions the obviousness of our existence. Hankering after the myth, Parsons concludes not in a joyous celebration, but by proposing that we disappoint the miracle. There is poverty; there is disease; there is iniquity.

Parsons laments our failings, just as her former Third Eye Foundation partner, Matt Elliot, does. The realizations of their shared despair differ though. Elliott courageously fuses Gorecki with Grooverider; Parsons selects far humbler and more commonplace elements to roll out as indictments. She doesn't proffer an alternative. Instead, she illustrates a space where the "other" may reside, and vivifies that utopian other by depicting its absence.

In this regard, Foehn's Hidden Cinema Soundtracks, the first in FatCat's new Splinter series, sits appropriately with Robin "Scanner" Rimbaud's Meld series. Both series seem intent on provoking both our third eyes and our consciences, and both labels have bravely embarked on a program of a weirdly didactic music. In our lazy media culture, we need artists to remind us, however tersely, that we haven't reached the end of history-- that ours is a long journey to the terrestrial Zion. It's we who should be grateful for these artists' assistance.

-Paul Cooper