Mario Verandi—Remansum

Mario Verandi’s Remansum is a captivating suite of electroacoustic tracks. Its combination of the jazzy and liturgical should please fans of Australian trio The Necks. Both artists tend toward a feeling of deep and unyielding mystery, and Verandi’s work at times bears such strong resemblance that less generous listeners may cry facsimile. The wonky melody of ‘Bosque’ bears striking similarity to The Necks’ Swans collaboration, ‘The Nub’. But in actuality, these similarities reveal both artists as pioneers who stretch in the same direction.

Verandi’s music feels oddly timeless. Remansum boasts cutting contemporaneity and, at the same time, attention to symphony and tradition. It’s like wandering from the noise of a medieval city; vaulting its walls to explore untended, dangerous wilds, in which a calendar is no more use than a candelabrum. ‘With Eyes Hidden’ best exemplifies this feeling of sublime danger. Thrumming arpeggios dominate its low end, the breath of a waking force of nature.

On many tracks, repeating piano phrases guide you through these landscapes. These phrases feel like warm and entrancing footprints to follow through the forest. Verandi dodges the sort of saccharine minimalism risked with this approach, delivering work that’s probably how Einaudi sounds in his own head; meditative, numinous, and full of mystery. The success of this sound is down to Verandi’s masterful control. Songs contain silent force, hung in suspension and bulging with potential energy. Remansum imagines a dangerous world; defined by an apprehension that a predator will erupt from the quiet. That Verandi sustains this mood for the duration of the LP is impressive.

It’s obvious that this is all intentional. Remanso is a Spanish word whose literal translation is ‘backwater’, but whose meaning here is ‘to hold in place’. Effectively, that’s what this album achieves—one extended and beautiful moment. Remansum is like taking a deep breath and holding it for the rest of your life.

Remansum is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Katie Gately—Loom

Katie Gately’s Loom arranges some disjunct experiments beneath a pleasing umbrella of bizarre balladry. Raw materials of concrète and noise are here refined, reshaped, and given a new life as sturdy foundations for tightly-structured melodic pieces.

‘Ritual’ establishes the album’s tone; a sweep of processed, half-distorted vocals and synthesisers which chatter like sealife. It earns its title, seeming to raise the album from nothingness, conjure it from the air either side. It’s also deceptively complex, layering vocals atop each other in a harmonic stack which feigns simplicity through how well each vocal line complements its peers.

‘Allay’ throws a new element into the mix, with Gately’s maximalist lyrics. Her pedigree as a songwriter and producer for (among others) serpentwithfeet is as clear in these dramatic lyrical lines as the off-kilter production which supports them. Gately leans in even harder on ‘Waltz’; a song which elevates its emotive power through what sounds like the pageantry of a medieval court, but infected nonetheless with a kind of nervous energy. ‘Waltz’ wouldn’t be out of place on Richard Dawson’s Peasant—the disquieting itchiness of thorns surrounds a big red heart.

The album’s centrepiece is ‘Bracer’, a ten-minute single which escalates from almost-whimsical reeded sections to a bludgeoning conclusion. Like most other tracks on Loom, it stands at the threshold of being “too much”. But it’s a threshold Gately seems to relish standing at. The level of control she displays in production, and track’s textural and melodic invention, allow it to sidestep becoming self-important crescendo-core.

‘Bracer’ signals a transition from the album’s first half to its second, which begins with ‘Rite’. A conscious mirror of ‘Ritual’ before it, this track quietens things again with some ramping down that, Disasterpeace-style, could be the glissando of some profane orchestra. It’s a beautiful track which is full of apprehension.

This apprehension is carried through into ‘Tower’, a funereal march which describes digging a hole “you would fit right…into”. The contrast drawn between a coming-together and lowering into a hole lays bare that in any relationship—with any attachment—we invite not only connection but inevitable loss into our lives.

The album is rounded off with ‘Rest’, a piece which holds itself in stasis. Loom leaves us uncertainly wavering at the gate of heaven, as one chord is sustained through three minutes of angelic arrangement. Whether the track is defiant, anxious, accepting, depends on who’s listening. But what’s certain is its reflection of Loom as a whole: as work which confronts death in hope, trepidation, thankfulness and with great power.

Loom is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

SØS Gunver Ryberg — Entangled

SØS Gunver Ryberg’s Entangled straddles the frontier between techno and noise; a collection of tracks which entertain as effortlessly as they challenge. The album hosts as many moments of extremity as it does fragile beauty. For long-time fans of Ryberg, the power and aggression of this work will come as no surprise. But some will be taken aback by its melodic tendencies.

'The Presence_Eurydike' is possibly the most gentle track Ryberg has ever produced, soaked through with divine, almost orchestral sounds. Most tracks on Entangled are dry, sharp, and brittle; petrified frogs. This one is still leaping around in the morning dew.

That's not to criticise anything else on here. Ryberg keeps everything at the limit, at the breaking point. But while uncomfortable, Entangled never becomes an endurance test. You keep wanting to turn everything up — not down.

The album ends on a high with 'Silver Thread'. It's a throwback to early electroacoustic music, with a soft drone that adds wonderful tension. It isn't that too-easy-to-evoke feeling of dread that so many electronic musicians are in love with. It's something more complex; anticipation, uncertainty. 'Silver Thread' punctuates Entangled with a question mark. And as it fades out, surrounded by its mystery, you will be desperate for more.

Entangled is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Bardo Todol / M. M. Peres / Úgjü Sectas — Adzer

Adzer is a collaborative tape with its fingers in quite a few pies. It's boldly broad in its content. But where broadness can sometimes deaden a release, Adzer shines.

We hover above soundscapes, no floor beneath our feet; observing from a dispassionate, unplaceable viewpoint. Organic and inorganic rhythms collide and collude. Paranoiac loops flitter by, switching between themselves restlessly. It's the audio equivalent of Gaspar Noé's Into the Void; unpredictable, scuzzy and overwhelming.

We are hovering over indistinct scenes. We arrive after they begin, we leave before they end.

Various techniques are employed to evoke this sense of movement. Bardo Todol brings concrète, field recordings of the mundane suffused with uncanny metallic friction (think the crying which opens Boris' ‘Buzz-In’). M. M. Peres' hosts bells and chimes, and approaches the joyful transcendence and hypnagogia of spiritual jazz. Úgjü Sectas stabs at classic, Parmegiani-style acousmatic chaos. Glitchy elements crash the work, with elegance, into the present day.

But greater than the individual achievements of this releases' contributors is its overall cohesion. What could easily have lacked direction instead cleaves its path straight to the sublime. This is a patchwork of many colours, waiting for you to wrap yourself in it.

Adzer is available for purchase and streaming here. An accompanying short film is also available here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe