Following through on the momentum of an incredible EP released on Opal Tapes only a few months back, the latest from Bulgarian electronic abstractionist Evitceles (out on SEAGRAVE) is a diverse and eclectic collection of rich, dark atmospheres and percolating, alien-like textures that displays an artist unburdened by the rigidity of genre, deftly balancing an endless arsenal of influences, ideas, and sounds, and boiling them down to something that manages to be at once lush and mechanical, terrestrial and otherworldly.
Broken August opens the album with a wave of shimmering arpeggios and insistent hi-hats that carries the listener through thick clouds of warm, gauzy synths, and half-formed melodies buried beneath impenetrable washes of reverb and decay, alternating between moments of cathartic lightness, and foreboding darkness. This darkness is carried through to title track Anuket, which brings to mind the outside of some scuzzy nightclub in a bad sector of outer space, a variety of low-lives and thrill-seekers clutching cruel looking sidearms under dim streetlights, the low din of throbbing electronic music echoing through the streets on a tangible atmosphere of danger and threat.
While tracks like Rippling the Spectra and June sound as if they have been beamed directly to earth on mysterious transmissions, like some futuristic, unknown form of hip-hop informed techno derived from ancient yet incomprehensibly advanced alien technologies, album highlight Don't Know manages to ground itself to more earthly domains with the kind of lonely, sustained electric guitar notes one might hear pouring through the windows of a dark basement at three in the morning, dizzying metallic flutters and the ghostly samples of cheers and whistles swirling around the listener to create a sense of nostalgia both comforting and haunted, like recalling pieces of some half-forgotten self.
Album closer hllf, sounding as if it was made specifically for uninhibited late night transcendence, pulses along on warm pockets of air, both dance floor and its inhabitants made weightless and ethereal as a deep feeling of interconnectedness and spirituality, found in these moments of collective bliss, overcomes the senses, dancers and performers, lights and sounds all becoming a singular entity, and a vehicle towards something infinite.
Throughout Anuket's 30+ minute run time, structures collapse and reform into unrecognizable shapes with no earthly reference, sounds in a constant state of flux as the music moves competently through a series of deeply encoded processes. Amongst this complex web of tubes and chambers, signals and synapses, however, lies something undeniably warm and grounded, a human heart pumping life into the cold, unreachable corners of mechanical function; a machine given breath, and in turn, the deep inherent need for shared experience, and the warm touch of another.