Elusive Metaphor waxes like a benevolent force of nature, one from a time when the world remained enchanted, premodern. Soft, engulfing, and serene sylvan settings, still in their infancy. They are showpieces of understatement, sonic texturing and delicious restraint.
Elusive is right, because the collaborators seem to be mulling something over, testing ideas in their collective mind, blowing billowing, contemplative puffs of smoke rather than fully-formed works—”Unspoken Shapes,” as one track is called. Which works. Elusive Metaphor is thinking music inasmuch as it is music that thinks. The ruminative nature of their album culminates with particular clarity (if that’s the right word) on the final tracks, tellingly titled “Where We are Not” and “Roundabout Mirages,” respectively.
This is the second collaboration across the Adriatic between Alio Die (Stefano Musso) and Parallel Worlds (Bakis Sirros) after the somewhat confusing Circo Divino in 2010, where the duo’s search for oneness seemed, well, elusive. To their second encounter, they both bring their usual instruments of choice—Alio Die his zithers, bells, field recordings and exquisite drones and loops, Parallel Worlds new and vintage machinery called CGS modulars, VCS3, OB-8, CV generators and the like. This time around, they merge seamlessly in a sumptuous, chronologically and geographically defiant whole—Elusive Metaphor is silken ambient, European, Indonesian, Ottoman, medieval, retrofuturistic, organic and artificial. Perhaps the pleasing result is partly due to the unrushed pace at which it was constructed, between 2011 and 2014. Less elusive is the fantastical cover art by Romanie, reminiscent of what a landscape painter who was part Dalí, part Hundertwasser and Andrei Rublev would dream up.
Elusive Metaphor waxes like a benevolent force of nature, one from a time when the world remained enchanted, premodern. Soft, engulfing, and serene sylvan settings, still in their infancy. They are showpieces of understatement, sonic texturing and delicious restraint.
Elusive Metaphor is available on Hic Sunt Leones.
