(2023) Grand River - All Above    


Review:
If you put the opening track of each of Aimée Portioli's LPs as Grand River on a playlist, you get a snapshot of her musical evolution. The psychedelic loops that start Pineapple transform into the gentle Yamaha plonks of Blink A Few Times To Clear Your Eyes, which morph into the sullen, muffled piano notes that open her latest release, All Above. These shifts capture her trajectory from techno-adjacent Dozzy protege into one of the most interesting composers making ambient and experimental music today. All Above is her second outing for Editions Mego, and a tribute to the passing of the label's founder, Peter Rehberg. It's also her densest record, exploring the various sounds and avenues of grief. One of the most obvious changes on this record is the pacing. Where Blink A Few Times To Clear Your Eyes was a Sunday spring stroll, All Above is a summer sprint. While there are still plenty of synthesizers and electronic effects, Portioli adds strings, guitars and horns, making each song feel like pocket symphonies that move in surprising directions. "Seventy One Percent," for example, starts skeletal with wind blowing over an empty stereo field, but halfway through Portioli introduces an organ that adds a hint of drama. On the "The World at Number XX," she gestures towards IDM with an arpeggio that wouldn't sound out of place on a 90s Astralwerks release, over undulating bass pulses, guitar strums and her trademark piano. These jump cuts in tone make it hard to classify her music. Genre has always been a sticking point for Portioli who has been unwillingly lumped in with the techno world throughout her career. "I don't consider myself to have started in the techno world, as I never composed and released any techno music," she told Resident Advisor in 2021. "My first two releases came out on Spazio Disponibile, which could be considered a techno label, but my music has never been techno." While no one is going to call All Above a techno record, it's easy to see why it's admired by people in that world. For every song like "Kura," which unfolds in the way we expect ambient tracks to—textural, subtle, fragile—there's also an "In The Present As The Future." The latter's fragile reverb chord progression is eventually cast aside for the record's brightest lead line, something you could imagine in a Barker or Avalon Emerson set. Similarly, the lead arpeggio in "Human" is somewhere between the neo-komische style synthesizers of Pineapple and Lorenzo Senni. This might make the record sound disjointed, but All Above is held together by Portioli's masterful grasp of mood. A sober feeling runs through each song here, from the neo-trance numbers to the electronica throwback of "Cost What It May" to the fuzzy AM radio samples and swelling strings on "Petrichor." These are sad and mournful songs, yes, but they also approach these emotions from different angles. What we're left with is a kaleidoscope of grief, where even amidst the overwhelming blues, Portioli is looking for new colours and shapes to bring into focus. — ra.co


   


Track List:
01 - Quasicristallo
02 - Human
03 - Petrichor
04 - The World at Number XX
05 - Kura
06 - In the Present As the Future
07 - Seventy One Percent
08 - Cost What It May


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, electronic
Country: Berlin, Germany
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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