False Mirror is the title of one of Magritte's more memorable works of surrealist conceit, featuring a large eye-like shape whose sclera is, rather than plain off-white, filled with cloudy blue sky. The connection with Mirror man Tobias Hornberger's music is tenuous, even false. The artist is perhaps referencing not Magritte specifically so much as reaching towards surrealism as an expressive mode associated with dream's dark mysteries, obscure object of False Mirror's desires.
Chronostatic Scenes, as titularly denoted, has its moments of virtual time-freezing, exploring the vertical color of sound with a suggestive visuality. Tokens of pop-psychology and neo-expressionism commingle uneasily in Hornberger's consciousness: "My music has always had a very personal character since it could be seen as a direct transformation of my inner self." Authorial psychobabble apart, a pronounced sonorous depth and an isolationism sometimes verging on solipsism characterizes False Mirror music; sounds like a call for frontier psychiatrist, but it's more fuel for today's innerspace cadet.
The style is recognizably a dark-ambient soundscapery of crepuscular hue whose not entirely serene meditative inclination will already be familiar from other Data-bloemers and obscurers, such as Danny Kreutzfeldt and Nunc Stans. "Plato's Last Dream" starts things off serenely enough, but by track two, the drone throne has acquired a darker upholstery. The following "Beyond the White Plainscapes" finds even deeper resonances close to Rich's Trances (cf., "Hayagriva"). "The Tower of Deception" ratchets things up further, with various nature ephemera, thumps, creaks, and rattles, and some low-end nocturnal hum maneuvring, the whole being blown through by a wind that's illness incarnate.
Overall, Hornberger establishes an effective sonic affinity between elements of an older space music tradition and contemporary experimental ambient, while also tapping into the self-consciously spooky soundtrackism of late-period Type-geists like Deaf Center and Xela. Chronostatic Scenes evolved from images and moods of dreams collected in the artist's dream-diary. Be grateful you aren't the dreamer, since this collection shows that from dream to dread, as in the casual morphology of the words, is but a swift internal shift.