(07.25.05) Warm and organic, Tesri is an intimate collaboration between Barbara Morgenstern and Robert Lippok (of To Rococo Rot fame); building from their distinctive styles, the album is filled with delicious software synths and patches along with piano, guitar, flute and a couple of vocalists to build a record that sings its inventiveness to the torpid movement of a warm sun-filled afternoon.
“Please Wake Me For Meals” drags you out of slumber with its thousand layers of bubbling beats while strings soar over a click track of digital handclaps. The forty-second “Ginza” is a whiff of guitar against a field recording from some sort of train or subway station, a brief interlude of melancholic guitar presaging a departure like a last glance back towards a loved one before you are sealed inside a train car and whisked away. “Kaitusburi” is an ethereal pop song rendered in an alien tongue (Meiko Shimozo supplies the Japanese
vocals), a message of longing that is communicated directly to your nervous system by the music. Damon Aaron’s wistful voice on “If The Day Remains Unspoken For” glides over a slick surface of electronic noise, the drum kit and guitar nearly lost beneath the static surface.
While “tesri” is an Arab-rooted Turkish word meaning “to accelerate,” Tesri has its own pace, its own languid temperament. “Gammelpop” arrives with fragile chimes, a subtle hum of percussion and a placid piano melody. The track builds in its own libertine way, adding an acoustic guitar that sounds as if it is being played by a delicate breeze, before squelching out into a stutter-cut of static. “Geisterjäger” oozes with the noise of sub-basement machinery, the rumble of air conditioning units and the whispered grumble of old furnaces, while synths dart and sprawl with loose-limbed abandon across the buzzing landscape.
Nothing moves quickly, I tell you, nothing on this record has got any immediate destination in mind. It’s a liquid collaboration between Morgenstern and Lippok, filled with holes that they’ve felt for the other to fill, ideas for the other to build upon. It is a construct of hazy notes and lazy rhythms. Tesri hangs in the air like a fading whisp of smoke. Breathe it in slowly and let it percolate through your system.
Tesri is out now on Monika Enterprise.
