YAIR ELAZAR GLOTMAN - Northern Gulfs

In Berlin and its surroundings, the name Yair Elazar Glotman has gained a certain notoriety over the years, albeit confined to the avant-garde scene, thanks to the sheer number of multimedia installations and video works he has presented in venues of real significance. Less well known is his background as a musician, work mostly split between film commissions and soundtracks for video sculptures, projects in which credit for his contribution has rarely been given much visibility. He has, in short, paid plenty of dues, but outside his native Germany few are aware of it: among that small number is probably Alessandro Tedeschi, the mind and driving force behind Glacial Movements, who reserves an important slice of his ever-evolving catalogue for Glotman's debut.

It's no great surprise, to be honest, that "Northern Gulfs" is the sonic account of a journey through unspecified Northern seas, from which the artist returned with a collection of field recordings subsequently worked into the foundation for the record. Rushing water, the dripping of stalactites, gusts of wind blended with subtle, timid digital disturbances, a backdrop over which the embroidery is instead entrusted to clear analogue expanses. The glitch origins of Glotman's art thus merge with a distinctly electroacoustic turn, making environmental isolationism the common thread running through six lengthy digressions among thin sheets of ice, immersions in the freezing sea, and impressions of islands abandoned to the fog, devoid of any sign of life.

The titles bring a few more details of the settings to light: "Khaypudyr Bay" takes its name from the Russian bay of the same name, a decidedly inhospitable place dominated by tundra, seals and polar bears, rendered here using almost exclusively disturbances and samples.

"High Tide" and "Low Tide" follow a similar pattern, the former dominated by a slow, soft swell of evolving drones, the latter left to the dictatorship of glacial tangles. "Karen Sea" – a not-clearly-identified location somewhere in eastern Russia – depicts a boat stripped of its sails, drifting among icebergs and islands, never allowing its journey the sight of a single ray of sunlight.

Only at the opening and closing does there seem to be any chance given to the survival of some form of life: the cyclical arpeggios of "Sunken Anchor", however, are soon wrapped in a blanket of fog, as if marking the entrance into a parallel world, from which the serene nocturnal calm of "Home Port" gives the illusion of moving away, while in fact finally finding an adaptation to its harsh climatic conditions.

It's worth stressing once again the foresight of the Glacial Movements label in releasing such high-quality work built on a concept that has long been established, and which many would have been quick to consider exhausted by now. For Glotman, though, this is an important beginning, a first step that can only bode well.

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28/06/2014