(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Englishwoman Riz Maslen
is one of the few female electronic dance musicians in the post-techno era.
She began recording under the moniker Small Fish With Spine, whose two EPs
were collected on Ultimate Sushi (Oxygen Music Works, 1996) and
then followed by the full-length Small Fish With Spine (R&S, 1997).
Maslen then switched to Neotropic for
15 Levels Of Magnification (Ntone, 1996), that introduced her
dreamy, deconstructed version of trip-hop and drum'n'bass
(La Centinela).
An even subtler psychedelic blend of jazz and hip hop,
Neotropic's follow-up, Mr Brubaker's Strawberry Alarm Clock (Ntone, 1998), opted for more tension and less structure.
The eleven-minute fantasia Mr Brubaker's Strawberry Alarm Clock opens
with musique concrete and then indulged in a mixture of
skipping polyrhythms and psychedelic vocals.
You're Grinding Me Down is a similar beast, a locomotive of rhythm that
encompasses avantgarde music as well as dance music.
Several layers of android rhythms propel Improved Industrial Dwellings.
The overall atmosphere is extra-terrestrial. One has the feeling of stability
constantly on the verge of instability.
Many of Maslen's songs are still meditations on the music of the past.
Ultra Freaky Orange is the cacophonous hip-hop-ization of a soul rave-up
in the style of the 1960s.
Vacetious Blooms is recasts 1960s' film music into a Caribbean sarabande.
Apple Sauce reinvents a madrigal as an accessory to cascading tribal drums and dissonant piano notes.
Saucer Song builds a symphonic sound out of stereotypes of sci-fi soundtracks.
Most of the album is tense and intense.
The tempo of Under Violent Objects is more relaxed but the ambience
is made more ominous by stark strings-like fluctuations and organic dissonances.
Unfortunately, Maslen does not follow up on this haunting idea.
The album was to mark the end of a phase.
Her art had become pure abstraction and mostly collage on the mostly
instrumental
La Prochaine Fois (Ntone, 2001), where songs floated weightless in
haunting soundscapes, gathering sounds as they go (found voices, ethereal
vocals, jazz flutes, melancholy pianos, classical strings, shoegazing guitars).
The Man Who Catches Clouds sounds like one of Anthony Braxton's minimalist improvisation played in a studio where are musicians are recording.
The effect is often disorienting.
Sunflower Girl sounds like Japanese folk music crossed with harmonica-driven country music.
Rote is pure terror made of floating electronics and vocal fragments,
but Micro-Cosmic is pure psychedelic trance.
But often the result is much simpler and gentler.
The flute-based theme of Closer to the Sun)
and the harp-based theme of Je Suis
evoke atmospheric soundtrack music.
She imitatas Brian Eno's ambient vignettes in Train to Katoomba,
and cheap exotic synth-pop in Still.
Elegant and otherworldly, Maslen also tries her hand at classical music:
the gentle operatic madrigal Cornershop Candy,
the aria for strings In Reverse Order.
Except for the (rather anemic) closer Memories, there is no beat, no groove, no dancing.
The album came with a bonus disc that is a cd-rom movie.
Maslen crafted a much more relaxed soundscape on
White Rabbits (Mush, 2004), with atmospheric tracks such as
Feeling Remote.
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