SY/N

(This article’s English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)

The Friulian artist Alex Ortiga is active under various names within experimental music, with a focus on instrumental solutions that are both atmospheric, restless, and deafening. As SY/N, a moniker that seems to suggest continuity at least with the material released as SY/IN, he presents the four imaginative and unstable compositions of “Life Anew.”

From the synth textures that open “Eyes Like Molten Gold,” a lament emerges, resembling violins from a distant future. But halfway through, a celestial and oppressive wave of sound strikes, turning into a noise storm that fades into glitches. The otherworldly choir of “Luce Eterna” floats ethereally but does not relinquish tension, streaked with noise, while “Where Dreams Collide” even intones a desolate melody before soaring into a post-industrial symphony that stumbles upon the closest thing to a beat in the entire album. Left floating in the void, the listener is met by a fragmented voice, a glitch that is both terrifying and mesmerizing—an android scream that somehow transforms into a chant just before the arrangement erupts again into a liturgy of vocoder and waves of noise.

“The Unknown To Adorn As A Life Anew” closes the journey: an apocalyptic blast is the first jolt, a cyclopean lament behind which a digitized chant emerges. A melody resurfaces, accompanied by whispers; a second noise assault sweeps everything away, yet a desolate melody still finds its way through the arrangement—an echo of emotion and poetry amidst the devastation, surrounded by distant voices.

From “Blinded” (2018), this album inherits an atmosphere full of abstract ambiguities, a sea of digital sounds that compel the listener to imagine and complete the sonic narrative. The manipulation and deconstruction of sounds are present, as is the raw intensity of noise, but a narrative dimension prevails—the interdependence of light and shadow, order and chaos, human and mechanical. A synthesis emerges from the contrast, sometimes fierce and frightening, steering “Life Anew” toward an existential message that questions our relationship with the unknown, the transcendent, and the oneiric. Already in “When Nothingness Is Bliss” (2023), Ortiga had revealed an evolution toward an android-like, grandly dramatic music, and this album is a welcome confirmation—poetry from a distant future.

04/02/2025