Different Streams is confident and cosmopolitan, not only because its far-flung participants each recorded in their respective hometowns—San José, London and Toulouse—but also (live? improvised? field recordings?) in Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and had the album mixed and mastered in Athens.
The seldom-heard triple collaboration. Not remixing one another’s sounds, not divvying up chores but combining ideas into one, rich ambient dronework with an ill-boding undertone. EUS is Costa Rica’s Jose Acuña, Postdrome is UK audio-visual artist Charlie Floyd, and Saåad, until recently a solo project of the very busy Romain Barbot, now a two-man act with guitarist Grégory Buffier. Different Streams is confident and cosmopolitan, not only because its far-flung participants each recorded in their respective hometowns—San José, London and Toulouse—but also (live? improvised? field recordings?) in Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and had the album mixed and mastered in Athens. And they have in fact done this once before.
Rather surprisingly, Different Streams opens with a bombastic, double-barrelled overture—”Dervish Dealer”—guitars blazing (although a violin cleaves right through them and lingers at the end, like the last man standing on a smoky battlefield)—and “The Bitter Truth,” rising like the dawn of a new civilization. “Wait” is an ominous interlude, what-happens-now? creeping low to the ground under heavy fog. By the time we reach “The Only Path,” the different streams merge into a fanfare, a gloriously skyrocketing, bird’s-eye view of a futuristic urban Utopia, which, after being covered by “Snowfall,” takes on a conversely dark hue.
Different Streams is Orwellian—it is authoritarianism with architectural brio. It sometimes feels as if the ad-hoc but sophisticated trio, though outwardly part of a system that requires them to play appealing music, are trying to warn its listeners that while they appear to live in the ideal city state, they have all been sinisterly disempowered. Not bathing in the light of the only path, but cowering under the penumbra of the shadow encroaching on those who walk it. On the digital version, “Sector 16” is an exquisitely textured but ambiguous closer. Who knows what the future holds? The compact disc continues with three additional tracks, a quarter hour of incidental music piped into the city’s atria and public walkways—pleasant and pacific with a certain nostalgic, electroluminescent bubbliness.
Different Streams is available on Soft.
