UCC HARLO - United

The winds of postmodernism have considerably reshuffled the cards of history: the established cultural references have lost their hegemonic status, and the territorial boundaries and pedestals that kept them safe have been toppled by the force of a reality finally globalized and then "flattened" by the erasure of spatial and temporal distances, until the rule of the all here and now was established. Such are the theoretical premises at the heart of the new electronica, and in particular of the hi-tech current, no longer the spokesman of futuristic visions but an autonomous aesthetic that escapes time and makes it collapse into a present that is no longer present to itself.

The second female debut on the Subtext roster after Ellen Arkbro, the classically trained instrumentalist Annie Gårlid (aka UCC Harlo) effectively embodies the death and rebirth of musical signifiers within the fabric of experimental composition: elements of the Baroque tradition such as the viola and harpsichord were originally played for real, but in the synthesis and acoustic distortion of "United" nothing remains but their simulacrum, a specter of frequencies that no longer belongs to them or to Bach himself, whose "Andante" breaks free from the overall economy of the Sonata in G Major and becomes an absolute, knowingly ephemeral "movement."

Whether it's the twists of a medieval monodic chant ("Palimpsest/Too Near", "Sumite karissimi"), an interlacing of tribal percussion ("Lyricist Of Panic"), an organ melody in the secondary acoustic plane, or the lively toll of Sunday bells ("Queen Anne's Lace"), the other and the elsewhere converge in a perspective concerned solely with the phenomenology of sound, albeit one of predominantly sacred or ritualistic descent. An inventory of transfigured sources left unresolved, perhaps because the primary need was to wrest them first of all from their own "orthodox" dimension, granting them, in Gårlid's words, a "right to obscurity and ambivalence" that history would otherwise never have recognized.

Halfway between the research of eRikm and the second effort by Martina Lussi, UCC Harlo does not point to new directions but rather contributes to further widening a stylistic breach that is increasingly shifting the balance of electronic music, pushing it toward expressive horizons that make incoherence and semantic emptying an alternative method of sublimation.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

29/03/2019