MARTINA LUSSI - Diffusion Is A Force

Much of the new electronic "school" – and the very latest work in particular – seems influenced and troubled by chaos, whether external or "nominal". Confronting the breakdown of human resources and relationships is almost inevitable when dealing with a musical field that relies almost exclusively on the same technologies that today connect our existence and keep it in precarious balance, like enormous guy-wires of global proportions.

Some face disorder on equal terms, feeding it with sonic accumulations that end up causing its collapse. Others, coming from the "measured" side of ambient music, decide to try to impose order, aware that no resolution is possible beyond artistic creation itself, an expressive vehicle for an overarching and uncontainable reality.

At first, then, the compositional swerve of the young Swiss sound artist Martina Lussi may rightly unsettle, given that she emerged barely a year ago with the precious collection of imaginary installations "Selected Ambient" (Hallow Ground, 2017). Yet one should not make the mistake of seeing it as a trivial attempt at alignment or even conformity with the dominant aesthetic of the "hi-tech" current: released by the French label Latency, whose catalogue already includes Laurel Halo, Yves De Mey and Andrea Belfi, the slim set of compositions gathered on "Diffusion Is A Force" retains a highly recognizable personal stamp and a composure that is genuinely rare outside atmospheric music.

Lussi's approach to the synthesizer sidesteps the easy tricks of the prevailing "nostalgia effect" of so many contemporary revivals, shaping its oscillations into simulacra of acoustic instruments (strings, ethnic percussion, harps and even female voices), artificial replicas of "other" musics that surface in obsessive but fleeting fragments, like involuntary epiphanies overlapping with the real. It is the latter, in fact, that becomes an interstitial element: squeaking shoes on a polished sports field, strolls along crowded sidewalks, stadium chants, the roar of motor races barely surfacing from the shifting sonic surface, creating an estrangement in which these sounds, rather than the heterogeneous and disorienting electronic textures, seem out of place.

A turned-upside-down world, then, and the same could be said of the album, which closes with an "Opening" where the garish entrance of keyboards and the stuttering return of a 90s dance rhythm only reinforce the chimeric image of a value system out of joint, an anti-narrative that demands, right to the end, the suspension of disbelief in order to acquire some fragile overall logic.

Beyond the extremely current concept and the intriguing discontinuity of the listening experience, it proves difficult, if not impossible, to establish an emotional connection with the intrinsically unresolved tracks of "Diffusion Is A Force", experimental in that they seem to seek not only new forms of expression but, even before that, the elusive feeling that would have generated them. Martina Lussi already appears determined to move into unexplored and highly unstable territory, a choice that, while offering no guarantee of results, paves the way for the stylistic innovations that contemporary music, electronic and otherwise, has always desperately needed.

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12/02/2019