Struktura
The main feeling I get from this release is a sensation akin to touching one’s own skin. In the sense that “Struktura” feels familiar, yet it is also unpredictable in terms of blood fluidity and the arising conglomeration of spirit between vein and surface texture. Of course, these are mere descriptive generalisations of an emotion that has to be felt by the listener, but they go some way to explaining a personal development of Strië’s refracting of the musique concrete framework with an early electronics essentialism. It’s quite like dub techno pioneers Rhythm & Sound as played by Morton Feldman. Iridescent glitch modules forming a cascading whole on second track “Man And The Cosmos Around”, with a resonating ring modulation being pierced palatably by atomic shifts in drone and white noise. These layers form a melody not unlike Christian Fennesz or recent Fluid reviewees Anjou, or similar ilk.
The pedometer presence — rhythm and metre — never slashes at itself or hollows out an edifice to leave on this album. Quite asymmetric in scope, the general consensus in Strië’s compositions — strings stretched and overlapping instruments — becomes abducted by a spacey finale. Quite like BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa’s epic composition of the same name, there are temporal temperaments that flit and flounder like a soul on the edge of a lead weight. Sparkling chasms form a viaduct impression on “Untitled 1956”, a sensible encounter between previous Strië strings and new cashew nuts and bolts of percussion, falling out of a posterity packet until there’s nothing left. Hearty drone swells and pulsating pushes of mood.
‘The Steamer Odin’ continues this theme with an altogether more coherently atmospheric structure, gaseously changing into solid and liquid forms like a candle over wax. Fire is present in the overall outlook, as if a genial metamorphosis is about to appear. In strident walking patterns of 16 bars the unwravelling Marsen Jules-like compost is splayed out in the watered soil and left to ferment a forgotten past — where does this thought go, why is the ideology headed, what does it mean for the concurrent endeavour?
Observationist sampledelia would seem a precursor to Iden Reinhart’s role as communicator with her audience. For example, “Foxes” flirts with a kind of deviant prescience from organic instruments such as viola to shuffling Murcof-style beats. This frisson with unadulterated melancholy places her music in a kind of Victorian: a rhizome (the rudiments of classical music, in this case) that touches on transcendence, ordered in its thinking rather than trivially lateral. What this means for her listeners is an apple that never rots, always maintaining a continuity over delivery, and which benefits from stripping back the drama in the nature of timelessness.