Ielasi’s eponymous second Häpna release doesn’t come as the refining or summarizing work one might expect from the prolific artist and collaborator. Despite being his most technologically demanding work yet, its compositions are more linear and inviting than ever before, and sonically the record is beautifully, meticulously meshed.
The record is certainly a change in direction and momentum if not overall mood. Despite all of the trickery and disconnect that I’ve loved in the man’s music thusfar, he’s made only mood music, never process music, however much process is on the sleeve. Dedicated fans may be turned off, though I was not. Giuseppe Ielasi is essentially an album of piled loops and the artist’s first grab at rhythm-based composition; process, in the broadest sense, is immediately apparent throughout. Nearly absent is the guitar that brought Ielasi up and stripped him down last year in the opaque skeletal blues/room tone suite Gesine.
Now comes a record of kitchen-sink-constructed analog delay homage to the Chain Reaction label, full of dubby clomp and snap and Vangelis wash, but cut through with all the expected vinyl scrapings, bedroom creepings, and anti-alien warmths of an artist whose first goal is intimacy and calm. Beats emerging almost accidentally from repeated piling, slide into the asymmetrical and plinkingly abrasive, composed as they might from the doorhinges, bottle tops, and creaked footsteps of a neighbor’s existence, or just memories or premonitions of my own. Those who’ve ever wanted to hear Loren Connors improvise over a Clicks And Cuts volume might hear it coming through the ceiling with this one.
The album matches the adventurousness in sound-sourcing of previous disks with a willingness to pile and repeat. Element of surprise somewhat deleted, an underwater drone dance party emerges, notes and figures popping and overlapping each other with some kind of natural freedom. The music involves the same consideration I needed to fully appreciate records by Zoviet France or Philip Jeck, time spent realizing that immediate recognition of process or effects is part of the music, increasing its physicality and in many instances becoming platform or counterpoint for the hidden parts. Ielasi increases the sensation of physical action and comfortable warmth in every element, offering his cascading loop conglomerates to the womby closeness that surrounded Gesine with increased cinematics and darknesses. It’s more difficult for me to appreciate Ielasi having been nurtured on the artist’s previous output where a certain fragility comes through (via more guitar and improvised textures), but this is a very fine record and no doubt a grower like all the rest.
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