Though attended by a similar sonic spirit, each bell chime, chain drag and string bow duly emplaced, Strië lets light play through in bright tone colors and shapes—suspended, augmented, diminished, blurring harmony and dissonance.
Strië‘s entrance to contemporary electronica came with a myth-making byline trailing ‘a retired prodigy actress and cellist who now lives in a secluded mansion on the rural outskirts of a town in Central Europe that shall remain nameless.’ Iden Reinhart had, of course, ‘made sure to erase traces of her background when she retreated from the spotlight.’ Her music, studiedly esoteric, self-consciously ‘cinematic,’ a pukka postmodern package tapping into electronic movers, late-classical shakers, and concrète mixers to siphon the spirit of Schaeffer, Feldmann, Pärt, and Nordheim, was thus endowed with a caché of ludic mystique.
Struktura names each track after a modernist artwork, e.g. “Vogel Wolke” (Feininger), “Chance and Order” (Martin), “The Enigma of a Day” (de Chirico), the appeal perhaps residing in the openness of abstraction—unfixed coordinates making more amenable ‘affordance structures’ (Krueger, 2011) for the pleasures of drift. The Muse once familiar to abstract painters is here pressed into Strië’s service to stretch and layer, to drip and smear sound color over audio-canvas (see artwork) in liquid chime, aether drone and earth rumble. Antique appropriations blend with modern textures, a modern classical base with post-gothic, doombient, soundscape, avant-garde, objet trouvé and spoken word elements, heard first on Sléptis and Õhtul (igloo-‘view here). A few notes in passing: crystalline glow smolders briefly in the shadows of “Proun”; ring modulator fizz and irruptions of sub-atomic drone and static noise shifts on “Man And The Cosmos Around”; strings and percussion meld with sundry noises off for queasy listening on “Untitled 1956”; a sub-marine dream broken by caustic heat and microsonic implosions on “The Steamer Odin”; evanescent haze and shimmer come with “Chance And Order” before “Foxes” brings stringed things sliding scuzzed on a scree of subliminal tech-shuffle. All trajectories finally converge, collapsing noise and melody, cadence and ambience, spectral voices borne on the breeze over broken glass and riven rhythm on “Enigma Of The Day.”
Struktura is, then, a descendant of analog and acousmatic experiment, gothic étude and classical gesture, its forms unfolding from reformations of originals, with seepage from source—a certain disquiet of mitteleuropäische lineage (cf. Górecki and Penderecki). Though attended by a similar sonic spirit, each bell chime, chain drag and string bow duly emplaced, Strië lets light play through in bright tone colors and shapes—suspended, augmented, diminished, blurring harmony and dissonance. For more informants on Strië sound background, try her Sounds Of A Tired City #2 mix, featuring, inter alia, Marcus Fjellström, Biosphere, Oval, Kane Ikin, Murcof, Elegi, and Erik Skodvin–whose Deaf Center sidekick, Otto Totland, incidentally, colludes with Struktura’s host, Serein‘s Huw Roberts, in Nest.
Struktura is available on Serein.
