Melanie Velarde - Parcel

Melanie Velarde - Parcel

Verdict: 4/5
Label

RVNG Intl.

CATALOG NO

CMMND003

RELEASE DATE

December 16, 2016

Written By

Gabriel Leașcu

Published

September 12, 2017

Parcel, soon to be released by the renowned experimental label RVNG Intl is Melanie Velarde’s auricular cabinet of curiosities, smoothly contextualized in the present-future continuum of our times.

Playful dubby loops with a distinctive ‘maturomantic’ approach, similar to the collective image of a utopian eco village, are embalming your defunct senses, like a deluding phantasma that lures you into nothingness. But this nothingness you’ve never heard, at least not in this form. You find yourself wandering through the different layers, tasting the experience’s cinematic flavor and craving for more.

Fluid soft synths, intertangling drones and vivid basslines, sampled either from personal field recordings or from sound artifacts discovered and carefully handpicked in some dusty experimental radio lab, create an eerie post futurist nostalgia mood that feels warm and safe, yet shadowy and surprising. The slightly rough transitions between each piece are like warnings of the fragility of these synesthetic states, resembling the dream holding sticks in Dali’s work; and it’s not a coincidence, for avant garde is at the core of this remarkable creation although its improvisational character is never out of hand.

An artist edition of twelve special LPs featuring marble dyed, silk-screened sleeves by Christin Ripley, and a cassette edition of Parcel will be available at Commend.

‘Beauty exists only in autonomy. No work that fails to express the intelligence of the possible can be a masterpiece. Poetry is a bridge cast over the abyss of nothingness to allow the sharing of different imaginations and to free singularities.’ From the Post Futurist Manifesto by Franco Berardi, February 2009.

Tracklist:

01. Bote
02. Memo
03. Tur
04. Wind
05. Parcel
06. Ocelot
07. Hoopla
08. Gaze
09. Wide
10. Crocodile
11. Sun’s (Bonus Track)
12. Portuguese Dub (Bonus Track)