Dozens of small dramas are being played out in a dense, urban setting festooned with shockingly green treetops. On the streets and in the stations, between the offices and apartment buildings, practical-minded men and women bustle past lazily drifting daydreams.
Named not after the Pearl of the Danube but rather the street in Tbilisi where Georgian producer Rezo Glonti works. Tourist info describes the topography of the city as shaped like an amphitheater and on Budapest, dozens of small dramas are being played out in a dense, urban setting festooned with shockingly green treetops. On the streets and in the stations, between the offices and apartment buildings, practical-minded men and women bustle past lazily drifting daydreams.
Elegantly combining electric guitar, sequenced synthesizers, ambient effects and cassette field recordings to achieve a rich, brocaded feel, Glonti sneaks in a fragment of Georgian futurist poet Pavlo Nozadze, who like all futurists possessed an imagination exercised by urbanism, technology and the rush to change (with the added, unwelcome piquancy of living in the shadow cast by the Soviet Union).
Budapest is a protein circuitry of scenes, dreams and allusions. The traffic rushes by on “Pulse Added Two” while “Sul Dges” wends slowly as the river beneath high, blue skies. Even when all lit up and festive as Broadway (“Arpfield Budapest”), Glonti evokes an abiding calm throughout, a raconteur at home in the cupped-hands bowl of the city.
Handsomely packaged as usual by Dronarivm, with a set of photos by Andro Eradze bound onto a manila colored cardboard wallet embossed in bronze foil.
Budapest is available on Dronarivm.
