For anyone who has spent any serious amount of time listening to the leftfield of electronica over the past three or four years, it's hard to imagine someone reinventing the proverbial wheel. I know the more I listen to new and "underground" electronica, the more I keep hearing the same things over and over. Phat beats make for a great 12" or live set but an album needs more. Nebulo gives a lot more. On Kolia, through atmospherics and melody, Nebulo has made the best electronica album I've heard since Ellen Allien's Berlinette.
Hymen
My first chance to explore this album was commuting to work, faring 5:00 rush hour traffic on the highway in a snow storm. I got blown away by how the first four songs worked as a perfect soundtrack to the snowy evening. As the highway winded down behind the main road of my hometown, snow is flying lightly through the air, swirling golden in the headlights of the cars in my rearview mirror and street lamps breaking through the line of buildngs between the highway and the town. Temporal and delicate spider webs float above the pavement, get briefly illuminated, then crushed and dispersed just as quickly under the wheels of traffic.
The opener, "Ant," skitters and plays along with this frail, winter beauty. The melodies, chopped and cut synthesizer strings and high pitched whines of feedback, wind around the rhythms the way traffic weaves in an out of itself, all the while, weaving and cutting a fine lace of fresh snow. "Automna" moves into much the same head space, a delicate air, heavy eith beats, pounding, chopped and syncopated. A toy-piano-like melody is countered with harsh orchestra samples and well controlled feedback. It raises my heartbeat, in joyous, romantic tension. The next two tracks flow through the same space, countering delicate, alien melodies with unexpected and dynamic rhythms. "Darkopale" darkly closes the opening passage. It is slow moving, and eery. Reminiscent of Datachi’s work.
Kolia lulls a bit after this exciting opening. The following songs, "Wen" and "Reverse," make a clear cut in the album's flow, like a change to the next movement of a symphony. "Wen," the longest song on the disc at almost seven minutes is just a little too long winded. It's the least dynamic piece, as well as the mellowest. "Reverse," a two-minute ambient interlude, feels like a little too much after "Wen," but a rest after the tension and release of the opening puts me in a place to think about how powerful and beautiful what was just experienced.
The pace of the latter half of the album isn't quite as intense as the opening, but wanders back and forth between dynamic rhythm-driven tracks and ambient passages. "Klik Me," "Nebula," "Siapese," and "Nokta" are less visceral and more heady than the first four tracks. The closing tracks feel more like exercises in cinematic tension than just iPod-oriented ear candy. As emotionally gripping as the opening tracks are, the ending of the CD shows Nebulo as a true composer, not just some jerk with a laptop and a lot of free time. He caught me right off with some flash and showy tricks, just enought to get me to stick around for the second half to really see what he's capable of.
The two remixes at the end work well in the flow of the album. Of the two, Ginormous' remix of "Darkopale" is a beautiful rendering, capturing all the beauty and redirecting the energy and tension tino a cliffhanger end for the disc.
I appreciate the way Nebulo balances Kolia into three solid movements. The strength and breadth of style and composition will surely make this disc hold up over time. Kolia is tense and dynamic, but not uni-directionally, there's release and victory. Any of these songs could be used for a film soundtrack but this album is lushly layered and dynamic. It creates images and ideas in my head rather than just allusions to some veiled nostalgia, not just to be an edgy backdrop for an automible or life insurance commercial.
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