CD - Ahornfelder
The harmonic structures in this work have a distracted quality, a fragile polyphony. Experimenter and transalpine videomaker Anne Laplantine is well-known for projects created under the moniker Michiko Kusaki e Angelika Koehlermann. She is now turning her attention to a style of digital pop, rendered in the form of "pseduo-ballads", which make use of fictitious synthetic orchestrations that modulate through various aural pleasantries. The attitude here is, however, ultimately bizarre, twisted and always ambivalent. The work is not without classical-baroque references, here restructured into a more contemporary guise. Refined sound miniatures often remain deliberately unresolved, as if to exorcise, while the (self-referencing) format of the songs include samples and field recordings that are abruptly interrupted by folktronics developments, or transversally arranged flute, guitar and drum machine sounds with larval melodies. This is a territory that may not seem specifically defined in terms of stylistic choices, but coherence does in fact prevail through the deliberately haphazard planning. There is no naïveté in this music - it is the product of a refined and eccentric sensibility.
Aurelio Cianciotta