One year after his debut album "Out of Forgetting" on Audiomoves, Szymon Kaliski is back with a new ep on Hibernate. It is a nice achievement to join such label for a second release.
It is not just the follow-up to his debut album. There was something still green with "Out of forgetting", a few hesitant steps, but full of innocence, emotion and intensity, a work in progress, surprisingly and disarmingly strong at times, but not made for becoming a classic album, mostly givings hints of a mastered expression yet to come and setting up a personnal challenge for him a kind of double or nothing.
His option has been to make it even more minimal, refined and introspective, avoiding field recordings of voices, using only non-descriptive or less obvious ones, like static noise, hiss, crackles, glitches and room noise, using electric piano and guitar with electronics and reverb above it all in order to create atmospheres of contemplation and meditation.
Static noises similar to feet walking on coarse gravel, drones sounds of what could be distant low bells tintinnabulating and echoing in a deep valley, sparse guitar notes which draw the distance and open the view on a large sky are the elements of the opening track "Without breaking".
"When facing north" opens with what seems distant sounds of rain and birds, looped and offered in an abstract form with a few electronic glitches. They are the background of austere electric piano notes which play the role of elements of contemplation and you feel like in a fragile shelter somewhere in the countryside one rainy summer day.
We then enter the eerie atmosphere of "Or Gently", walking in the middle of a vast forest, half-lost and disorientated, so quiet, until absorption into the environment.
Szymon Kaliski obviously choose the direction of more abstraction, abandoning more and more linearity like on the last track "With Grace", which echoes some 12k productions, using contemplation in order to achieve a certain dissolution of feelings. He's making on "for isolated recollections" an impressive step forward and reaches a real achievement in a delimited area. This ep has been a slowdown to focus on different aspects of his songwriting with the goal to perfect these.
I'm curious to hear now how he will open some doors and enlarge his aesthetic perspective while keeping this starting impulse of minimalism and perfection.
http://www.hibernate-recs.co.uk
http://www.treesmovethemost.com
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