NIOBE - Blackbird’s Echo

“Blackbird's Echo” is probably a crucial waypoint in the slow pilgrimage of Niobe from glitch music towards the actualization of a singer-songwriter craft with an archaeological, refined flavor. She preserves the minimal imprint and underlying abstraction born of years of practice at the laptop, while letting sober orchestrations, pre-war suggestions, café chantant numbers or Hollywood nocturnes, Mitteleuropean folklore and glimmers of tropical exoticism (almost a small tribute to her ancestry: half German, half Venezuelan) take root on the freshly tilled soil of electronics. A simple, frugal kind of songwriting, one that never settles for citation for its own sake or a taste for paradoxical juxtapositions, but instead finds a perfect consonance on the level of melody and arrangement. A metaphysical tableau in which past and present intersect and overlap, creating a post-modern, futuristic, imaginative musical universe within a nostalgic, retro frame. Like adding just the right tint of color to a splendid black-and-white photograph without crumpling its formal expressiveness or betraying its emotional involvement.

A style that had already distinguished the excellent “White Hats”, almost three years ago now, placing Yvonne Cornelius, aka Niobe, a head or two above the crowd of slight and irregular acts who, since the turn of the millennium, have been taking winding paths towards electro-acoustic syncretism. Here, the compositional stitching together of all these elements is even more essential, direct, measured out in motifs that have the uncommon virtue of sounding, even after many listens, varied, disorienting and extremely enjoyable.

Starting with “Silicone Soul”, a chamber soulful ballad carried by acoustic guitar and cello accompaniment and dotted with “binary” echoes in the background, mirrored by the carefree, arpeggiated, whistling little tune that flows through “You Have A Gift”, and then more lightning-quick, precious antique miniatures: like the muffled emissions of a tube radio on the title track, a little melody that echoes through the empty parlor of an abandoned country house sometime between the two wars, and the 78-rpm free-jazz of "Shark".

An uninhibited, vibrant and inspired work, as is also evident in the brilliance of its “meatier” tracks: operatic temptations over concrete backdrops, electrostatic outbursts, layered voices, tape warped in reverse, all of it punctuated by the “tell-tale heart” of a distant kick drum, in the splendid “Time Is Kindling”; the unexpected dance languors of “Cadillac Night”: dubstep rhythms, funk basses, nu-soul vocal effusions chiseled onto a quick-setting glitch mixture; the Latin-tinged lounge-soul of “Fever” with a sparkling synth solo; jazz-pop pasodoble with “a cappella” digressions like “My Conversion”; hemp-scented dream-folk like “Gnomes And Pixiez”, embellished with transverse flute; ending with the Copacabana carousel of “Ava Gardner At The Swimming Pool” and culminating in the wormhole of “Blue Wolf”, a kind of shamanic dimensional rift that contaminates post-rock, glitch, drones, classical vibrato, voices and dissonances lost in the blue of the sonically indefinable.

It's always a pleasure to let our ears drink from the source of Niobe.

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11/06/2009