Azured Vault is a project run by young poet and multimedia entrepreneur Kimberly Bianca, who also works on other projects like Disaster Girl and Hero Inc. TACE sees Bianca collaborating poetic performances with such Australian downtempo producers as Sun In Aquarius, Mote and Asylum Seeker.
TACE is an interesting project, but lacks polish. Bianca’s voice and lyrics are a bit hit and miss, some people might like the lateral sensibilities and obscurity of her wordyrappinghood, whilst it might grate and annoy others as being a bit cheesy. However, I’m observing and reviewing this from an attempted objective point of view and side with artistic intent, so I’ll focus on the better points of this album and view it from the perspective of what it’s trying to achieve, and attempt to bring more focus onto the instrumental component of this compilation.
The ambience of the first two tracks ‘Era of Eternal Etcetera’ and ‘An Octopus Moving Between the Tide Pools’ – produced by Cly-Suva and Human-Robot Interaction respectively – are reverberating ambient loops for Bianca’s poetic backing. They don’t really have anything spectacular going for them.
‘Dust Particles’ – produced by Mote – definitely hits with its grainy and subtle glitching through slow downtempo, and is vintage chill music. Bianca sounds more on point in this one, although still lacking polish and needing to place more focus on sentence structure rather than relying on Kerouac stream-of-consciousness. Likewise, Sun In Aquarius and Asylum Seeker deliver with their signature sounds in their individual collaborative tracks with KB. Bianca’s voice is an issue and obviously needs to spend more time refining her messages and should attempt to find more cohesiveness to the instrumental content.
As a concept, TACE is dead-on in the vibe it attempts, and it’s a brave collaborative experiment from Bianca, who is obviously someone with a lot of energy to network. However, Bianca needs to develop her own craft some more in order to come up to par with the talent she is working with. A good collaborative effort with a lot of potential as downtempo meets vignette, but needed more time to cook for KB’s potential to be drawn forth. Of course, more time equals more experience and practice.
Link: http://azuredvault.bandcamp.com/album/tace
