Hibernate’ latest signing, UK producer Isnaj Dui aka Katie English, works in the label’ familiar language of electro-acoustic nature strip ambient but does so by exploring a number of unusual dialectics. Central to each these six tracks is a kind of wispy synthetic flute, part real-life wind instrument part cheesy new age patch, but how much of either is never clear. That might be one of contemporary digital technology’ greater musical achievements: not this very flute patch, nice as it is, but rather the ability to so thoroughly confuse the real from the artificial. Whatever it is, it sounds neither unpleasantly retro nor earnest and folksy; it remains an undefined hybrid, a 1970s new age trope lost (happily) among modern digital bedroom laptoptronica.
Further confounding things are the thumb piano strums on “Peripheral Motion’ that recall spacious Japanese-exotica shamisen tones, looped to accompany a grinding hurdy-gurdy drone. That it collapses into textural tone clusters a la Ligeti and Penderecki, and remains lulling, is all the more convincing. ‘What Lies Inside’ is perhaps more representative, a grounding of sorrowful synth horns over which gentle wind melodies are sketched, ambling and stalling over ten minutes. Here the ‘Solitude’ comes to the fore, but the ‘Abstract’s is never far away.
Joshua Meggitt
