DISPLACES is an album that I’ll find myself drawn back to, or haunted by over and over, providing sometimes an intimate, intuitive understanding of something bigger than me, and others giving energy from some obscure source, or else… The thrill of not knowing exactly what will only keep expanding.
A cartography of the ungraspable
Francesco Fabris’ new album DISPLACES, self-described as a cartography of the ungraspable, is out now on Bedroom Community: the label, entering its third decade, has always heralded music with a modern classical influence but also heavy on electronic experimentation, from its early classics to more recent triumphs — above all, Lyra Pramuk’s Fountain and Tilman Robinson’s CULTURECIDE, two records singlehandedly reviving choral and electroacoustic minimalisms respectively. Bedroom Community is then a perfect fit for DISPLACES, an album donning additional production by two of the label cofounders, Valgeir Sigurðsson and Ben Frost, and playing with post-industrial and field recording, acoustic and artificial, sonic darkness and blinding light, stillness and chaos.
Inspired by artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler, “Barricading the Ice Sheets” and its video are emblematic of this approach. The track opens on sounds that could be atmospheric or synthesized, drones overlapping with liquids dripping and ice crackling. Rather than occupying separate spaces, these elements become symbiotic. Are the close-ups of ice the focus, or is that what you see through them? A crescendo leads to a sudden drop, sub-bass and high-end hiss competing for attention around the main melodic line, until it all fades as soon as it came and we’re left with birds, or dripping, or compressed air escaping from ice, or a non-existent hybrid of the three. Opener “Extraction of the I” follows similar steps, with exceptionally high levels of energy concentrated in restless synths occupying the subterranean and extreme high end alike. Black and white liquids and gases form unknown topographies in the visuals – like the sounds, they move and explode, and are shot through with violent light. These tracks make themselves allegories of climate collapse, combining archetypes of the ecological and anthropomorphic dimensions.
Complexity as deep as the ocean ::
The langspil, a traditional Icelandic drone zither, provides the base texture to much of the album, and most obviously in the two “Monoliths.” In that, it reminds me of the way acoustic instruments are used in Domiziano Maselli’s Lazzaro, an album that (incidentally) Fabris helped mix and master at Bedroom Community’s Greenhouse Studio. These are two vastly emotional albums, unbridled both in their expressive drama and the development of their concept. The obvious technical mastery and the blurring of the analogue and the digital only allow the producer to really let loose, rather than boxing them into a certain high standard.
This multi-layered and eclectic style draws on Fabris’ previous experience in field recording (such as the Vakning and Meradalir projects with Ben Frost, whose influence is clear across the board), in the audio-visual and electroacoustic context (PETRA with Ava Grayson), and in ambient (the STILL~AEOLIAN EP on Room40). All the best features of this diverse artistic corpus merge to map a complete cartography spanning scale from the quantum of “Xanadu Phasing” to the supermassive of “Wolf-Rayet” – the latter, in particular, evokes the extreme temperatures and emissions of the titular stars with build-ups that push harder into heat and distortion until they get too much to handle, vanishing each time in a different aftermath: a sub frequency, white noise, church bells.
DISPLACES is a triumphant record offering a representation of complexity as deep as the ocean and as unrestrained as high winds, its details finely sculpted from the subatomic to the geologic level without compromising expressivity and the emotional load of the music. It is an album that I’ll find myself drawn back to, or haunted by over and over, providing sometimes an intimate, intuitive understanding of something bigger than me, and others giving energy from some obscure source, or else… The thrill of not knowing exactly what will only keep expanding.
DISPLACES is available on Bedroom Community. [Bandcamp]
