Hosted by Jorge Mantas, under the cloak of indulgently named and inclined The Beautiful Schizophonic, comes this assemblage, drenched in a musk of hyper-imagined bedroom-bound longueurs of laptop-lathered longing (mmm, the indulgence is infectious!). Musicamorosa is trailed with the heady referential aromatics of artistic influences ancient and modern. In addition to Proust – about whom he has draped the main fabric of the conceit on which the album is founded, he reels out a parade of writers (Poe, Dante), painters (Friedrich, Waterhouse, Rossetti), moving on up to French new wave cine-auteurs such as Rohmer and Rivette, then their post-modern postcursors Wong Kar-Wai and Sofia Coppola, before clinching the deal with a couple of erotic photographers. This ferment of ideational and sensual lays the ground for the incubation of a veritable wallow in sonic reverie.<\/p>\n
The prime sonic strategy underlying The Beautiful Schizophonic is the drone, but that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153schizophonic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d element brings with it an array of indoor field recordings, sampling and acoustic instruments, laptop-manipulated. Mantas, somewhat preciously perhaps, but no less honestly for the faint reek of pretentiousness that will strike some, purports to be \u00e2\u20ac\u0153searching for the sonorization of affective environments that express my deepest innerself.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d To which the most immediate response might be: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we all?!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, but once you break through the verbiage and the opening sequence drifts in, it sweeps away sardonicism, casting an incantatory spell. Your heart may start to ache and a drowsy numbness may even pain your senses, Keats-like, as if of hemlock you had drunk.<\/p>\n
Musicamorosa seeks no less than to patch itself, however obliquely, into Proust\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ideas on the affective life of the heart, rooted in the French tradition of romantic pessimism. The Proust-derived track titles are more suggestive than directorial, and, incidentally, an expressively engaged antidote to the hermetic blankness of much abstract electronica. Mantas draws further linkages between the unquiet solitary writer confined to a Parisian soundproof room and the experience of a modern laptop composer, himself enclosed in his own headphone ecstasy with its fragmentary aur-reality. Both are dream-basing melancholics, the one whose search for temps perdu must live on retrieving scraps of deleted scenes in re-thinks and memory-jags, the other in analogous music-mediated soul searches. Links between love, melancholy and memory are invoked through digitised orchestrations speckled with electro-acoustic shadings. Musicamorosa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drones are charged with harmonic iridescence, of which the peculiarly pretty-in-pink girlie-cartoon artwork shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be seen as representative. More than a hint of shadow attends the luminous \u00e2\u20ac\u0153un \u00c3\u00a9tourdissant r\u00c3\u00a9veil en musique\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, an aching melancholy t(a)inting its sweetness. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153L\u00e2\u20ac\u2122amour, c\u00e2\u20ac\u2122est l\u00e2\u20ac\u2122espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur\u00e2\u20ac\u009d sounds no less than the subject\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s suspension in lovelorn languor turned to dark drowning.<\/p>\n
Viewed in the context of a somewhat sullen and spotty debut on night-ocean drones label, Mystery Sea, Musicamorosa can be seen as a more elegant and affective creation – a romancing of the drone. At times it approaches the air of wistful refinement of such as Stars of the Lid or Eluvium. In its more technology-blurred moments, as on the concr\u00c3\u00a8te of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153les oiseaux qui dorment en l\u00e2\u20ac\u2122air\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or the gorgeous \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cantiques \u00c3\u00a0 la gloire du soleil\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, the less ascetic of Basinski-believers could be seduced into the beautiful schizophonography secreted on Musicamorosa.<\/p>\n
Alan Lockett<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hosted by Jorge Mantas, under the cloak of indulgently named and inclined The Beautiful Schizophonic, comes this assemblage, drenched in a musk of hyper-imagined bedroom-bound longueurs of laptop-lathered longing (mmm, the indulgence is infectious!). Musicamorosa is trailed with the heady referential aromatics of artistic influences ancient and modern. In addition to Proust – about whom … <\/p>\n