Superimpositions is cannier, burrowing inward to locate our limbic triggers, note by note.
“Pure appreciation.” Desperate plea or empty promise? In an era of sky-high concept inherited from our modernist lineage, of publicity spin gone gonzo, of commodification and content strip mining, expressed in our virtual vernacular of the viral, is it possible to truly experience beauty as it exists in an objective sense, liberated from outside forces? Part metaphysics, part sociological experiment, it’s a question we all should ask ourselves occasionally if we are to ever to fully reckon with the exhausting industriousness of the 21st century’s creative artifacts.
Lorenzo Senni’s Superimpositions—the Italian producer’s latest mini-LP for the previously vinyl-only boutique label Boomkat Editions—bravely poses some of these questions to the fiercely protective audiences orbiting the close-knit core of the musical avant-garde. Superimpositions’ sculptural re-imagining of the sounds associated with progressive trance picks up exactly where Senni’s previous record, Quantum Jelly, left off, and with it an improved sense of purpose. Jelly, a stark and startling record full of steely needles of melody fused into rhythmic gradations of tone and intensity, aquatinted hues etched in decayed metal, was released by the uncompromising Austrian label eMego in 2012, appearing at a time when an interest in EDM—essentially a generational update in the big room rave music of the late 90s, progressive trance in particular—was peaking with mainstream audiences. To say nothing about the peculiarity of turning on the car stereo and hearing remnants of minimal techno, twitching footwork patterns, druggy psychedelia, French filter house riffs, or Croydon’s own crown jewel, the “drop,” on current Top 40 radio; that a similar (if not precisely parallel) movement was beginning to flourish among the upper tier of electronic experimentalists was far more interesting. Looking toward more accessible genres to create challenging new music, here were serious artists making serious attempts in reversing the standard crossover dynamic.
Quantum Jelly’s spartan interpretations of trance music fell somewhere between Vladislav Delay’s suite of derailed dub techno for Raster-Noton, Lee Gamble’s pirated jungle collages on PAN, Mark Fell’s string of messy cross-sections of Chicago house and two-step/garage as Sensate Focus, and Ricardo Donoso’s own brand of eerie, curling vines of trance builds recorded for the quiet workhorse Digitalis. All of these artists were plucking the most captivating qualities in these functional songforms and placing them in sterile quarantines to be examined context-free (or perhaps to suffocate under their own context-rich references) by the listener: what you took from these recording depending entirely on your forensic approach. As the dance shifted to pop music masses and “real” dance music was consigning itself to limited edition cassette tape editions on niche labels, these artists, in a bewildering mix of irony and tribute, were ingeniously reconfiguring the sounds that had formed the foundations for their previous career experiments and were forcing them even further against the walls of the nightclub.
Superimpositions is lighter and perhaps more outwardly romantic than his previous record but the aim is essentially the same: to harness the highly physical impact and honest emotional simplifications of mainstream trance music and siphon whatever value is to be found in it. “Happic” buckles and vibrates like a heavy magnet collecting voltage from passing currents; “Superimpositions” breathes in slow, deep lungfuls of hyperthermic respiration; “PointillistiC” finds us in a bright museum, circling statues of dancers frozen in ecstasy, our eyes taking in their lapidary forms carved in pristine alabaster.
If Jelly was content in inducing a trance-state from its ceaseless repetition, Superimpositions is cannier, burrowing inward to locate our limbic triggers, note by note. Stripped of its surrounding signifiers of vocals or percussion, these intense melodic figures are free to meander and explore at will, elementary particles released in an icy ether. In these seven crisp tracks built from subtle variations on riffs of rich sawtooth harmonics, Senni artfully asks us to suspend any reactionary response to the maligned musical style it draws its inspiration from, and through his deliberate contrasting of silence and saturation—a classic minimalist maneuver—directs our attention instead to the complex rhythmic interplay of these dense, synthesized sounds, the alternate pleasures they offer, and pleads us to put aside our judgments for the sake of pure appreciation.
Superimpositions is available on Boomkat Editions.
