The four untitled tracks on ‘Wege’ (which translates as ‘path’) fittingly segue together to lead the listener on a cerebral sonic journey that’s more akin to feeling one’s way in the dark than taking a direct and clear route to a specific destination. Yet just as darkness heightens the other senses to compensate the lack of visual referencing in setting one’s co-ordinates, so Andrea Belfi creates a meandering aural route through unknown territories using methodologies influenced by Steve Reich’s ‘Pendulum Music’.
Sonorous tones, bumps and clanks provide the backdrop to distant voices, snaking rhythms and fragments and figments of melody that on the first track draw their inspiration from the far east and flicker like mirages in the heat. The sensations it evokes are tentative, fleeting and edged with a certain trepidation.
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The second track is more percussive, an insistent and urgent high-hat like the click of a swarm of crickets underpinning drawling country intimations, paving the way for the sonic abstractions of the second half of the album, which drifts into a sonic neverworld and slowly tugs the listener along to an invisible destination.
Andrea Belfi Online
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