Dream pop and nightmare scenarios seep into each other to their mutual benefit resulting in an hour-long tone poem in a hundred monochrome shades. The songs are sung with restrained ardency. The darkness is a backdrop for the moonlight.
[Release page] Stunning premiere release for new Slovakian label Soun Records. Ürögi Jani and Mária Gasparová have created a brave, new Manichean world, in which dark and light are complementary rather than contradictory. He is Illl and she is Irma, but I don’t really understand the division between the two in the track credits, where some pieces are attributed to Illl vs Irma and others to one or the other, since it is also stated that all songs were written in tandem. What is clear, however, is that all the music has been mastered by James Plotkin, guitarist on innumerable darker projects and lately much in demand for his audio services.
”Washily” pads in on little cat’s feet balancing on a humming overhead electric wire, Irma dreamily harmonizing with eyes half-closed. A Harold Budd piano pastiche, warm and vibrant inside, chilly and rainy outside, is followed by ”Self Irreality,” an elegiac piece for guitar over pittering beats, whose fervency is underscored by the audible, echoing sliding of the guitarist´s hand up the neck of his instrument. “The Last Ride of the Old Funicular” is another solo piano piece, its lonely, skeletal melody bodied out with field recordings. “Kodben” is song whose lo-fi elation brings a lump to your throat and “MIss Maggot” mildly melodramatic with a steam-driven rhythm.
”Broken Chemtrails” is masterfully arranged and laden with gripping subtext beneath a captivating, fourteen-minute guitar narration. In my imagination, Plotkin especially enjoyed the corrosive guitar lingerlingly tearing itself apart. The album closes softly with a remixed iteration of “Washily” by the admirably unclassifiable Jesse Somfay,
Dream pop and nightmare scenarios seep into each other to their mutual benefit resulting in an hour-long tone poem in a hundred monochrome shades. The songs are sung with restrained ardency. The darkness is a backdrop for the moonlight.
10-15 mA is available on Soun. [Release page]
