Art of Empathy - Evening Sessions (2007)

Originally wrote & published on October 2nd, 2007

Prior to pressing play I had to look up the term Empathy to see exactly what it meant, since it failed to appear in my mind’s dictionary. Apparently the term means ‘The understanding and entering into another's feelings,’ which I suppose every human being can accomplish to an extent, though as everyone feels and thinks differently I personally find it hard to wholly understand another’s feelings, even if I’ve found myself in a near exact situation.

All personal babble aside, Art of Empathy is the solo medium of Jef Janssen who resides in Diest, Belgium. Jef’s lovely music is a hard one to pin point as it contains several qualities of dark folk and darkwave/ambient styled music. Jef himself handles the instrumentation of acoustic guitars, piano, synth, lead vocals, percussion, and programming, while he’s joined by four friends who add further vocal depth plus violin and flute.

Jef’s songs are largely despondent pieces of music centering around acoustic guitars, atmospheric keyboards and his own whispery dark voice, plus the occasional appearance of the other mentioned instruments. The music generally carries a feeling of melancholy, dreaminess, and obscurity, which is in my opinion, the ideal mix to immerse in during the autumn period of the year. Although AOE is largely dark folk inspired I also noticed a slight darkwave influence and some songs even contain sampled voices and dark ambient moments.

Through these eleven songs I find myself constantly impressed, although ‘Delightful Darkness,’ ‘Dow Joneses Lullaby,’ and ‘Tiny Doll’ stand out the most. Pleasantly this album can be downloaded from last.fm, the Art of Empathy website, and the bands record label, which also contains a heap of admirable releases that I suggest you look into.

Largely I find ‘Evening Sessions’ to have little fault, and as I just said you can download it for free, if nothing else at least check out the songs I mentioned. You will be impressed by Jef’s dark art.