It’s a small world after all, we find here a project with Swedish singer/songwriter Sara Lunden joining forces Ukranian electronic artist Andrey Kiritchenko for a 25 minute EP.
Sara’s voice in de first track Come With Me doesn’t immediately take me in, so to speak. In the following track it turns out it wasn’t so much the voice, but the melody that was somewhat problematic for me. As the EP continues things get more exciting, in melody but also in arrangement. Don’t You Remember finds Sara somewhat absentmindend it seems, droning through soaring electronics. Next we find a more traditional song, with plain guitar, electric piano, ghostly backingvocals and some seemingly random sounds scattered around. Halfway into Erotic Dreams the sound reminds me of Depeche Mode, in some peculiar way. The sixth and last track finds us floating into the sea as Tonight seems to be some odd seashanty-out-of-joint.
It turns out that this EP is much nicer than I initially thought it was going to be judging on track one. Somewhat comparable to the female singer/songwriter with electronics combination we know from Susanna & The Magical Orchestra and Niobe’s White Hats album, but very much creating their own little soundworld.
Martijn Busink
Review
Bluermutt – Decivilize after consumption
The musical entity peculiarly named Bluermutt (a word suggested by eBay) creates, like the infamous Perrey & Kingsley, quite catchy pop through ‘avant garde’ means.
Not that the guy from Barcelona goes as much overboard as that colourful couple. Not in the sense of painstakingly cutting tapes, which has become a lot easier with the arrival of computers and not in the sense of the almost sickening happy-happy-joy-joy coming from that ‘in sound from way out’. That said, Bluermutt does make popsongs that are upbeat and uplifting while incorporating a lot of harddisc editing. Pretty much every sound that’s recorded on his harddisc has been tampered with. There’s a hint of Richard D. James album as well, in its naivet
Andrey Kiritchenko – Misterrious
Andrey Kiritchenko is a fairly prolific Ukrainian based musician who since 2001 has released over 20 albums- which have seen him dip his sonic toe in the genres such as: electrionca, folk, electro acoustic & drone works. Misterrious finds him offering up a collection of atmospheric often fragile yet harmonic piano pieces; that are lined with field recording elements and touches of guitar, glockenspiel, mouth harmonica, auto-harp, Tibetan bowls. Most of the tracks here see Kiritchenko coming up with a melodic & often atmospheric sequences of piano notes; to which he then carefullly and lovingly builds around a mixture of: subtle often hypnotic yet effective field records elements, crystalline mainly acoustic guitar strokes, auto-harp atmospherics, glockenspiel tinkles and all manner of subtle yet satisfying and very mood setting noise making and percussive matter. The tracks for the most part stay around the four minute mark; meaning that Kiritchenko gets his sonic and atmopshric point over perfectly, but never lets the tracks feel over stretched or become padded.
An enjoyable, highly atmospheric and often cinematic collection of piano based pieces; which are weaved by field recording detail and other instrumental flourishers. And as always with anything on the Spekk label the disk is presented in their distinctive house style oversized folder style- which features rather lovely yet simplistic line drawings by Olga Indovina which fit