Antipole & Paris Alexander - Crystalline
When a work certifies the change in the world, goes out of its way to scrutinise its movements, to colour its angles with impressive methodicality, to reveal its moods and slowly disintegrating habits, the result can only be exhilarating, no matter how feverish the overall picture.
Karl Morten Dahl is an experienced artist, eager to navigate through the fragments of heterogeneous impulses, compacting the visions of his own musical impetus to establish a sense of continuity between style and mode, this time, however, raising the bar to take a leap towards that Norwegian sky always at odds between the desire for sunshine and the ability to enjoy darkness. The latest effort is a sweet martyrdom, delightful and dynamic, created in co-ownership with Paris Alexander, another multi-talented genius. The talent from Brighton does something better than lend himself: he enters Antipole's project as a man who also has access to command of operations, for a result that is inside the chest, well guarded.
Crystalline is a sonic concept album, a glass glove that smashes convictions and certainties to bring a welcome fragility, through an icy circle of anaesthetic and surgical dance steps.
Surprising, it offers songs like hidden tears with a partial ceremonial dress, but, thanks to the Darkwave fury kept in check and the elegant but murderous Coldwave, it transports an art project of absolute gloomy splendour into reality.
As if the pain were playing hide and seek, the whole becomes contained through the guitar lines that take care to make it dreamy, held together by a putty of keyboards that oxidise and consolidate, to give the composition the colour of eternity, which becomes the true identity of these howls that are shy but capable of signalling the hunger for expression that the two artists have experienced and transported in these grooves. All perfect to end up in a ballroom with no windows, no strobe lights, no way out, to experience a suffocation that makes one surprisingly free. Karl, as if he had found within himself a never-before-desired projectuality, creates a visual and auditory field, in whose union strength is compactness, to achieve continuity, creating a record that becomes a novel. Able to write lyrics with adrenalin built in and using his voice like a delirium in a straitjacket, Paris Alexander makes everything perfect, spinning emotions even further. The ambient imagery is in these movements, sinister, sombre, between horror and science fiction, the caution that takes it upon itself never to develop noise and outbursts, but to keep the palpitations from becoming vulnerable. Sometimes it happens that it is better to suggest than to show an avalanche of elements: Karl and Alexander know this and this is the strong point of an album that rises, for the old scribe, to the highest position on the musical podium of 2023. Careful and skilful in making the compositions the film of a film that cannot be seen but perceived, the two become astronomers, magicians, masons of thought, cementing the work in a gothic dust with no tricks or clothes of belonging: the sense of abandonment in each track is enough to know that they offer no consolation, but a foothold to join us in a delicate sadness. A gathering without weapons and without claws. As if there were a threat, looming and powerful, this latest effort has the virtue of not seeing one song stand out above the others in order to have a uniqueness that fascinates, attracts, involves and makes it all a sticker on our skin wet with clear, fluorescent emotions. The timbral mixtures turn musical clouds into masses of moving notes, with the aptitude to transform them into a service that leads to the search for truth, amidst electronic beats perfectly supported by the grey brushstrokes of phrases that come out of guitars inebriated by the succession of chords.
This is the most mature work for the Norwegian Harlequin, who, as if he had emerged from a corridor full of autumn leaves, drops a wind full of sighs on us, giving his beloved Darkwave the task of being a captain with a long beard and a steady hand, to steer the boat of compositions towards perfection. There is no doubt that Karl and Alexander have not invented obscurity, but they have given it a better, balanced and real dignity, to annex to their needs a necessary transformation: eight wise pills enter our circuit, absorbing the acids and releasing sociable toxins necessary to balance our desire to immerse ourselves in their musical ocean. Electronica and Coldwave are real expressions in search of companionship, children of that North that for forty years has been sealing its loyalty pact with countries that have received more attention. But this album in 2023 cannot be beaten: every abyss finds its epicentre in the pain and maturity of believable invention and that is what Crystalline is made of.
Which is a compact Odyssey of slow-moving icebergs, there is never any sense of a sonic maiden rising up, conjuring up, dragging listeners along to discover the rest: Karl has created a canvas, used brushes on a perimeter that has the frame of enchantment, so that everything is a wrapping to be lived as an experience, salvific or not this does not matter, what is clear is the will not to see preferences create injustice. Feelings and uncomfortable thoughts (masterfully put forward by Alexander) touch the present-day void and force it to reflection, with Master Karl directing the emotional traffic in the library where each of the eight pages writes the story of a memorable work: that it is the best of the year is a consequence of this wedge which is cold only on the surface that is Crystalline...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Supino
11th May 2023
https://antipole.bandcamp.com/album/crystalline
