A dark forest, an entire region covered in darkness, a small, dark space that continually contracts and expands. Zoharum’s release schedule is fast and furious, embracing a broad spectrum of worldwide experimental electronica. Its most recent parcel revels in the dark side.
ForrrestDrones :: Najas Flexilis Exequiae
Robert Skrzyński, previously enjoyed enormously as Micromelancolié. The exploration of much ado in one, deceptively peaceful glade. Skrzyński establishes the scene, a cold, clear, arching firmament cradling the full moon. Beneath its canopy, the air crackles with static. Below it, a beleafed, autumnal forest bed. And this is what the keen hearing of the owl picks up going on underground as he holds his midnight watch—burrowings and mushrooms pushing through the surface. A single, hour-long piece, with an eeriness that makes not only the small fauna wary. Haunting synthesizer superstructure, vinyl run-on close to the ear, tactile as a hand running over the bark of an old oak tree. Moonbeams filter down between denuded branches. It is a beautiful if harrowing night. You will shiver, smell woodsmoke and turf, clutch at your thick sweater, dig after your pocket flask.
Strom Noir :: Glaciology
“Névé” heaves into view, huge, white and loud, but with his spinning, tactile, melodic gusts and guitar loops, Emil Mat´ko plucks it apart snowflake by snowflake, reducing it to a handful of powder. “Firn” has an almost flamenco feel as it tickles acoustic strings, behind which a vastness like a Spanish galleon cresting on a wave looms. The bobbing “Penitentes” seems to be viewing the ice from below, after the glacier has calved an iceberg, the huge cube viewed through blue water by seals at play. Conversely, “Moréna” has all the light and air of a bird’s-eye view. As a bonus, the full version of a composition previously released in slightly abridged form on a Dronarivm tape, “Niekedy Sa Vracaju” (Sometime Return) debuts, a beautiful piece that hangs a trembling guitar on harp strings somewhere between the dark and the dawn.
Maninkari :: Continuum Sonore 7>14
Apart from regular synthesizers and irregular percussion, brothers Frederic and Olivier Charlot play atypical-in-context instruments, such as bodhran, viola, cimbalom, santoor, achieving textures many and pleasant. This is particularly evident and effective on “Part 9,” which has a whole other physicality than the slightly flea-bitten, woozy palm court orchestra that opens proceedings. There is a sense of foreboding throughout, a slow shimmy into even darker reaches. Specific yet diffuse enough to conjure the image of play that never starts in a theatre whose lights never go on. Although the curtain finally rises on an old-fashion matinee space opera for “Part 12″—satellites zooming, a dramatic theme taken up by cello over which the violin describes crisis, like a satellite degrading in orbit. “Part 13” is the soundtrack to that dream in which you are falling, falling, falling, but never hit the ground.
All releases are available on Zoharum.
