Weekend Intermission is our regular feature where we look at an artist or band not from the Nordic countries, just to mix things up a bit.
Futuristic, pulsating, and wildly experimental, Argentina’s Melisa Aller’s latest – and second – long-player is an ode to mankind’s penchant for destruction. Spelled with a K here, looking more clinical – even vicious – as a title, she has built a world around our modern desire to construct relentlessly whilst simultaneously ensuring our own downfall.
It’s frightening, flamboyant, and utterly fidgety (in the brightest and best sense). It’s a festering carcass of what could have been for the human race, a glimpse of the road ignored for the one sadly favoured leading to the ‘Destruktion’ on the tin, yet extraordinarily hope still emerges.
It begins with the track ‘01:10’. And we know something simultaneously of the earth and the otherworldly is being captured. It’s a sonic landscape, museum gallery or headphone music, a journey, an experience like no other.
Uncomfortable, industrial, it feels like watching a film in sonic form. Shapes and images, stories and emotions garnered from her masterfully sculpted soundscapes, with hell never far away, Aller is wielding her musical nous in majestic fashion. Here, life is dark and deadly. And delicious. And as dark as it unarguably is, there is a lingering sense of redemption to add to the overall sensation.
Music is normally set to existing scripts or views of films. In this case, so remarkable is the audio, it should have a film created to fit its own beguiling storyline.
‘11:11’ bangs and shuffles, creeps and moans. The songs grow into splendid avenues, washing over us like electronic water with throbbing bass absorbing the listener, trance-like, grandiose, and addictive.
The tinkering at the factory bench on ‘05:50’, the accompanying industrial sounds are both the musician hard at work and the results of her creativity. We hear it spilling from the hands of a woman with electronic dreams captured with nuance, grace, and a gripping dose of the grotesque.
It is in this embodiment, rather than shying away from the ugly, the painful, even the harrowing, that Aller has managed to create an honest, death-defying, and challenging work. One that wishes to be heard, speaks for itself, stands true, a colossal beaming beacon of electronic music.
When she enters the fray with chanted mantras, the track takes a mind-blowing turn, builds a head of steam, mesmerises the listener. Astonishing scenes in the sonic film she has woven around the listener’s consciousness, taking it over.
The songs are related, they want to remain together, yet each has its own energy, shuffling, bursting to breathe, to escape, to explore beyond its own body.
Final track ‘12:21’ stretches out to over 24 minutes and offers something of a troubled refuge to the listener, a final act to tip the scales of circumstance in her favour. That this is a work of startling beauty is undeniable.
Aller’s dark sanctuary of ‘Destruktion’, a response to bleakness and violence, is a place for anybody who has stared into the blackest chasm and returned from it to embrace the light of life. The salvation in these mesmerising tracks is evident to anybody willing to give them the time of day. It’s not for nothing it is proposed to be an immersive experience. Only by allowing oneself to submerge entirely can the music truly be permitted to perform its tricks.
(Continues after the Spotify link)
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melisa.aller/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melisa.aller
Bandcamp: https://melisaaller.bandcamp.com/
