BjorgenFjorgen
Well-Known Member
Sandro Perri’s Impossible Spaces is a technicolour treatise on identity, connection, and the never-ending task we all face in reconciling our past, current and future selves against loss and the passage of time – cycles of matter and antimatter. These seven songs offer maps to just a handful of the innumerable, and often surreal, roads spanning out from each time we ask ourselves: how to change? How to move forward? How will I?
A master of dynamics, Perri’s arrangements range from the sort of maximalism that never loses its sense of direction, of underlying groove or momentum, to lighter (though rarely stark) moments where you can catch your breath again. Throughout, each note, each reverberation and decay, seems to be in exactly its right place, taking up no more and no less room than it needs. Despite the grandeur, density and intensity of certain extended passages, this carefully plotted architecture and sense of restraint has a calming effect, like sitting shotgun in a spaceship next to an ace pilot. You might never have done this before, but you’re in good hands. Just look out the window and enjoy the ride as Earth passes by.
Nylon-string and electric guitars, flutes, loose jazz drumming, electronic beats, interpolated and syncopated sampling, and countless other sounds combine to create a sonic landscape for dreamlike narratives and ideas to manifest, work themselves into a tizzy, resolve and slink away, leaving little evidence of their dramas behind. In this setting – perhaps the liminal oasis between the desert of the cover and the palm tree on the back, or an impossible one that doesn’t provide such clean, binary arenas to work out their worries – Perri explores doubt, cloaks it in black magic and draws a moustache on it, and meets a wolfman by the water who wants to shave his face, body, and head. From the opening moments of “Changes”, he announces
I’ve been laid down in the arms of an absence
Where the space is only spacious
When I open up my eyes
Darkness has rounded me
But in the centre, there is a light:
It’s where a bonfire of all that is excess burns bright
From there, the album ventures to burn off that excess down to the essence beneath, possibly hidden so long it’s been entirely forgotten. Two songs later:
Changing is the game
Oh, it’s the ever-expanding sticky wet light cage
Well even if I choose to refuse to use it that way
Ah, I get closer to the flame
And panning out in all directions
I seem to want to come back to a simple refrain:
How will I? Will I give?
The album reaches its climax in the 10-minute “Wolfman”, which alternately expands to the infinite vastness of its setting –
Today I saw you, big as the ocean
Yesterday I was sure I’d forgotten how to swim
I jumped right in; you covered me like a lotion
Yesterday I was sure I was losing my skin
The sting of salt, the thrill of devotion,
That’s the one I trust, incoming forward motion
– and folds inward again:
I zoomed in for a look
What did I see? What did I see?
Clouds and sunshine and joy and pain
So I zoomed, zoomed, zoomed in again
And what did I see? What did I see?
All that which seems to be erasing me
I can choose to learn again
Impossible Spaces can be a difficult album to access. It’s dense, diverse in its sounds and approaches, and, from the outside, a bit labryinthine. It certainly took me a long time to appreciate it as more than a curio, a unique achievement in music and songwriting that, for all its warmth, didn’t really seem like it was going to invite me in. But in time it has become a cherished friend. I hope it becomes one for you, too.
You can purchase this album on Bandcamp or from Constellation Records, or wherever fine music is sold. Please take a listen and share your thoughts with us.
A master of dynamics, Perri’s arrangements range from the sort of maximalism that never loses its sense of direction, of underlying groove or momentum, to lighter (though rarely stark) moments where you can catch your breath again. Throughout, each note, each reverberation and decay, seems to be in exactly its right place, taking up no more and no less room than it needs. Despite the grandeur, density and intensity of certain extended passages, this carefully plotted architecture and sense of restraint has a calming effect, like sitting shotgun in a spaceship next to an ace pilot. You might never have done this before, but you’re in good hands. Just look out the window and enjoy the ride as Earth passes by.
Nylon-string and electric guitars, flutes, loose jazz drumming, electronic beats, interpolated and syncopated sampling, and countless other sounds combine to create a sonic landscape for dreamlike narratives and ideas to manifest, work themselves into a tizzy, resolve and slink away, leaving little evidence of their dramas behind. In this setting – perhaps the liminal oasis between the desert of the cover and the palm tree on the back, or an impossible one that doesn’t provide such clean, binary arenas to work out their worries – Perri explores doubt, cloaks it in black magic and draws a moustache on it, and meets a wolfman by the water who wants to shave his face, body, and head. From the opening moments of “Changes”, he announces
I’ve been laid down in the arms of an absence
Where the space is only spacious
When I open up my eyes
Darkness has rounded me
But in the centre, there is a light:
It’s where a bonfire of all that is excess burns bright
From there, the album ventures to burn off that excess down to the essence beneath, possibly hidden so long it’s been entirely forgotten. Two songs later:
Changing is the game
Oh, it’s the ever-expanding sticky wet light cage
Well even if I choose to refuse to use it that way
Ah, I get closer to the flame
And panning out in all directions
I seem to want to come back to a simple refrain:
How will I? Will I give?
The album reaches its climax in the 10-minute “Wolfman”, which alternately expands to the infinite vastness of its setting –
Today I saw you, big as the ocean
Yesterday I was sure I’d forgotten how to swim
I jumped right in; you covered me like a lotion
Yesterday I was sure I was losing my skin
The sting of salt, the thrill of devotion,
That’s the one I trust, incoming forward motion
– and folds inward again:
I zoomed in for a look
What did I see? What did I see?
Clouds and sunshine and joy and pain
So I zoomed, zoomed, zoomed in again
And what did I see? What did I see?
All that which seems to be erasing me
I can choose to learn again
Impossible Spaces can be a difficult album to access. It’s dense, diverse in its sounds and approaches, and, from the outside, a bit labryinthine. It certainly took me a long time to appreciate it as more than a curio, a unique achievement in music and songwriting that, for all its warmth, didn’t really seem like it was going to invite me in. But in time it has become a cherished friend. I hope it becomes one for you, too.
You can purchase this album on Bandcamp or from Constellation Records, or wherever fine music is sold. Please take a listen and share your thoughts with us.
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