mira calix - skimskitta
new album on warp. nice packaging that flows well with the website.
i've no idea what a skimskitta is but it sounds a difficult thing to love.
the album is basically an hour long experiment of textures and noises interspersed with the odd piano/vocal melody line here and there. the first few listens i found my patience wearing thin but slowly the beauty within certain parts was revealed.
there are some pieces of lovely sunday afternoon romance ('poussou') but there is a lot of seemingly random noises which i'm sure mean something to mira, but didn't keep my attention levels on alert status.
there are spooky far away scary singing on 'woody' and several other tracks, each of which that could easily be used on any decent creepy movie. the non uniform beats sound to be made out of a collection of home made noises pumped through a midi based beat creator - this is all very original sounding stuff.
obviously there are passages that i found a little too self indulgent ('sixnot6') and made me crave a 'proper song'. but, i strongly suspect i am not the target audience for this type of music any longer as i rarely have time for a 60 minute piece of experimental music these days. it's all too personal .. the album only benefits from repeated headphone listening and is not ammenable to general listening with friends .. its a solo album both in creation and enjoyment.
having said that i did put this on at work and it made the hours tick by for some strange perverse reason.
file under - strangely interesting.