Through Glass is a course and wiry album, amplifying the weeping fuzz of Tim Hecker into crumbling pillars of sonic ash. Like Hecker, Novellino’ pieces can be surprisingly rich with emotion, a sorrow lost in digital mess, but there’ a greater sense of active machinery, and industrial decay, at work. Through Glass could be a representation of the gloom and hopelessness of post-industrial labour, the sounds of drills and clanking metal ground down with granular synthesis into shapeless chunks of sonic gloop.
As with much music dependent on heavy processing part of the pleasure is glimpsing the source material through the murk. Choral voices seem to lie beneath the dust storms of “Sirens’, while “Her Red Shoes’ seems lost beneath airplane roar and hair dryers. This is the dynamic that runs through all of Through Glass, a balance between romantic emotional expression and complete noise obfuscation, with neither a clear victor.
Joshua Meggitt
