Aursjoen - Strand
‘Lightness for me is associated with precision and determination, not with vagueness and random abandon’ - Italo Calvino
In the spectacular artistic form of progression within emotional tidal waves, slowness becomes the only reasonable housemate, in a peaceful and collaborative coexistence.
Here, one of the members of the multi-purpose band Octavian Winters triggers a sensual detonator, with low rhythms linking the sky and the obscene of the world, a music therapy that, starting from electronics curved on empyrean and secret scales, turns pop upside down and writes songs like meteors and static dancing statues, calibrated by her singing, corrected in the race by counter-notes and strategies of a production careful to pour light among ethereal flashes and yet full of that blackness that does not slender but worries. On this basis, everything becomes an experience that is not cathartic but protective: there are places of the soul that the San Francisco artist prefers to keep as drops of glass in her creative journeys.
Glacial music, where the panegyrics of the common man tend to shatter, because Aursiøen is a phone call of subterranean notes. From which everything starts to extinguish spells and follies.
An E.P. that liberates it, reinforces it, turns the known upside down and becomes a residence of fluvial experimentation, maintaining contact, in its vocal timbre (full and obscure), with those voices that in the past, in its previous project, did not find adjacency and expressive possibility. Siouxsie, Sinéad O'Connor, Björk, Elizabeth Frazer arrive to remind us how the obstinate search for originality is a stupid thing: there will always be someone who will find a name that has it to rejoice in a useless and derisory victory.
This singer has crutches in her uvula, her hand writes lyrics that rise into her mouth to be gentle ghosts in the darkness of nights longing for a distraction. What she narrates and the way she does it puts her on a temporal descent: compositions like a distancing, like a sibilant wound in search of a pleasing harmony, with hints of classical music, starting with a blackish trip-hop within gothic allusions, with a guitar and its delay shattering purity, doing it divinely.
The alternative pop becomes lightened folk, with truly radiant and sublime extravagances, with stutterings that pollute confidence, making us listeners in a state of fragility, with a compositional mechanics that brings the possibility of a popular reception basin closer, silencing those who would like it only for a few souls.
The layering, the arrangements, the progressions, the emphasis and the lightness (that of Calvino in the introduction) are the elements that continue to give birth to clusters, fragments, sparks of ideas that clamour for notes, as if they were coming out of the awakening of a person in a coma.
Deadly, caustic, an abductor of arcane melodies close to mythology, this artist works on private concepts, sows a slab of impetus with her gaze inside the cartridges of a voice that fires off register changes with care and skill.
And of the lyrics, the dreamy references to the eighties, the feeling that six songs sound like thirty, we don’t want to talk about it?
This is where the second part of Dead Can Dance's career should be brought into play, perhaps the closest reasonable metric for framing the great path taken with this work, to be able to give it a credibility it surely deserves.
For the Old Scribe, this is not just the E.P. of the month and year 2024, rather it is the wish that thinking souls may discover with these delicate artistic brushstrokes a series of unconnected worlds, but in the process of sniffing them out, in the spectacular mode of circumspection.
And one discovers how violent beauty can be: in the face of all this, a healthy heart loses effectiveness and collapses, happily...
Song by Song
1 -Nytär
A land without water comes out of these electronic contraptions, call them computers, keyboards, beats, it doesn't matter: the beginning of the song is already a geyser that is precise in the ears, a brilliant intro for the voice that seems to come out of a 4AD concert in a moment of distraction of the gothic mass.
Pj Harvey watches attentively: she understands how Aursjøen uses the high register not as acclamation or prayer, but as a way to bring angels and demons to earthly soil. An example of how ethereal music is at ease with a storm, slow, full of electronics and suspense.
2 - Apollo
Here are the Octavian Winters in the guitar intro: a gothic broadside that throws down the sky! And then it's a desert dune in Tuareg's bickering, blessing the marriage of darkwave and trip-hop, with the refrain sentencing the ease it possesses of allowing melancholy and cheerfulness to coexist. Mysterious, it conveys a pleasant itch, given by the methodical, refined yet powerful singing.
3 - Lilypad
We change, we forget and we go on: we are now among the pillars of world music in search of voracious souls, sighs with echoes and reverberation that whip up the cream of a song form that gives way to hints of guitar and keyboard, in the rocking of an afternoon that sees the voice more hidden, like a meteor in search of a metaphor. But then in the opening of the refrain the major notes bring us balance and enjoyment. And we are reminded of the same singing attitude of a singer who is still an early missile in the trip-hop world, that Skye Edwards of Morcheeba who often echoes in these six songs.
4 - Suns Of Tomorrow
Then there is the strangeness and the different toy in the places predisposed to playfulness.
Here is this track that visits the unknown, the sacred, the crumpling of the voice to make room for bells, for magnetic beats, and a sad veil covers our eyes perfectly. The experimentation here becomes grazing wisdom, to persevere with the brevity of the chord turn, then giving way to an impressive rhythmic and scenic change, between hisses and dramatic suggestions of the highest level, with incursions of wind instruments that create a terror representative of an impressive genius.
5 - For Want Of
The master echo of the inner drama comes out to smoke: a song that penetrates us through light dark vocal, while the music, compact, leaden, leaden, structures the listening inside Diamanda Galas's manic madness. One sings to hit the air, to irritate and keep the spirits good, like fairies, like devils. Aursjøen impresses, overwhelms us with the way she uses complexity to explode but only in the distance...
6 - Strand
My God. A closing that puts us in a mood, that makes us orphans, as beauty and lightness decide to give birth to an amorphous daughter, stunted and close to an untimely end. A nightmare represented as a contemplative act, a nomadic transport of ancient millenary cultures that find a welcome here, and one weeps, with joy, with joy while everything becomes mute with these vocal prairies that become the only wind on which to deposit our infinite thanks…
Alex Dematteis
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento
Nota. Solo i membri di questo blog possono postare un commento.