Los Angeles based electronic producer Valeria Zaklinskaya released her 2017 debut EP ‘Pernicious Serenity’ while she was still completing her degree in music production at the Berklee College Of Music, and now this follow-up EP ‘In A Sense’ on Ohio label Orange Milk offers her follow-up, with five tracks that continue to showcase her dizzyingly intricate and immersive approach to sound design.
There’s certainly a dreamlike and hallucinatory feel to a lot of the material here, with rapid shifts between tempos and moods that seem to obey their own interior logic. ‘Revelation’ sees slow broken polyrhythms building into intricate layers against a backdrop of dark icy synths and glitchy effects, before a wash of wordless vocals and droning electronics drags everything down to a crawl, only for the insect-like rhythms to sudden rear up again against chaotically noodling sequences and echo-soaked snare hits.
If the aforementioned track calls to mind one of Patten’s more dreamlike explorations, ‘Unhinging’ lives up to its name as serene ambient drones give way to scattershot broken rhythms, whirring electronics and booming explosions, the entire track seemingly to gradually fall apart into stuttering pieces before contorted digital timestretching pulls things to an epic close. ‘Chimera’ meanwhile introduces Zaklinskaya’s own vocal harmonies as a primary element as delicate piano arrangements and sparse live drums build into a rich bleed of textures against crashing percussion and swelling orchestration.
‘Innocence’ meanwhile sees feathery guitar strokes trailing against glitchy electronic effects, only for distorted chords to suddenly drop in as the background synth arrangements become increasingly dramatic, the chaotic samples building into a storm of jagged layers, in what’s easily this EP’s most post-rock informed moment. As a taste of Velf’s hyper-detailed and ever shifting soundworld, this is pretty impressive.
