CHEVEL - Blurse

"Blurse" is the latest LP from Dario Tronchin, aka Chevel, for Stroboscopic Artefacts. The Veneto-based producer had already released on the same label the EP "Monad" in 2010 and the 12" "One Month Off" in 2014.

Dario Tronchin is a very enterprising guy. His label Enklav puts out good stuff, and there's a fair amount of hype surrounding his work, which only inflates its perceived value even before you've heard it. On top of that, he churns out records non-stop, which is no small feat. His partnership with Luca Mortellaro aka Lucy continues on this new production for Stroboscopic, a label of wonders much loved by critics.

The album ranges from one territory to another, opening up to warmer horizons that never clash with the project's underlying soul, whose bones and limbs are techno and industrial. This is interzone electronic music, where you venture forth cautiously and where the line between dancefloor accessibility and experimentation is so thin and blurred that it's hard to pin the work down. Definitely a record for the bold, for people who know what they're doing.

"Blurse" stands for "bless and curse". A title that hints at a work of illumination and sudden darkness.

The record seems to have three primary souls. First and foremost, the one closest to the dancefloor, which bursts out in the more rhythmic, martial tracks like "Identity Switch" and "#Loop33", but above all in "Down And Out", where the rigor dissolves into rough, dirty industrial.

The second soul is the ambient one, and it's the one that leaves the record in a state of melodic suspension. It's a soul that muffles the atmospheres, whether they're darkly noisy or more purely musical. In places it dominates everything, erotic, sensual, aquatic. The track that closes the album, "A Form Of Love", seems to suggest unexpressed, painful emotions, the form of love hinted at by the title. The same goes for "Heimweh", where the delicacy of the melody meets echoes of textbook Aphex Twin.

The third soul is the more industrial one, all sharp sounds and destructive noise. "Flippant Remark" is a heart beating inside a metal box. And "Comb", the track that opens the album, is a crossing of sharp blades that fades into the elegant tribalism of "The Windrunner".

Thanks to the sheer wealth of ideas and the artist's versatility, this excellent work does suffer a little from intellectualism and unevenness. Perhaps it would have been better to pick one path and stick to it, sacrificing a few tracks along the way. But the work of such a restless mind can't be fenced in. Precisely for this reason, we can consider it an intellectual album, more about the head than the heart. "Blurse" is therefore the work of a very cunning overachiever, in which dancefloor and experimentation chase each other, flirting and winking at one another, helped along by the dark.

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15/12/2015