SAVARAN FEATURING BARBARA DE DOMINICIS – Strandline
(Somehow Recordings, 2012)
After an intense collaboration with Julia Kent in Parallel 41, the vocal improvisations of Barbara De Dominicis continue to build sources of inspiration for the aural panoramas of important artists devoted to experimentation with electronic music.
This time, the author of these compositions, to which this Neapolitan performer lends her voice, is the well-traveled Welshman Mark Walters, aka Savaran, who applied an abstract earnestness to her vocal conjurations and those of Francesca Genco, in order to best present the brainchild of what was originally conceived to be an EP of instrumental ambient music, centered on electro-acoustic filters and field recordings captured in the coastal areas of Scotland.
During the almost-22 minute long EP, the vocal element attaches an imaginative depth with a texture that, beyond the shaking beats of the title track, attests to quivering ambient saturations, mottled with distortions that in some cases (“The Dark Murmur of the Sea”) are somberly dull. In the torsions of “The Siren Song,” it is possible to catch a glimpse of so much as dark reflections Dead Can Dance, while in the piece “S’ode ancora il mare (“One Can Still Hear the Sea”),” the brackish instrumental foundation appears and better integrates with arabesque melodies that reverberate the sonnet of Quasimodo.
In the extemporaneousness of the operation, the pithy Ep “Strandline” successfully manages to crystalize in the music, images and sensations, demonstrating like different languages, not only can they co-exist, but they completely merge in order to offer a declension of ambient music able to expand its horizons in a significant way.
(translation by Barbara De Dominicis)
http://savaranmusic.wordpress.com/
http://www.soonapres.com/
music won't save you 