Review Summary: It's all connected.
In the vast realm of electronic music, the ways of expression are anything unlike having a voice pouring words right into your ears. Conveying a message through instrumentals is a challenge, an art that sound manipulators like Jon Hopkins or Tim Hecker have mastered: speaking through a note, breathing through a beat, and channeling a mood through practically identical life experiences that we all have shared at some point during this ephemeral and hazy journey that we call “life”.
These experiences connect us, because we relate to them when they are mirrored unto others, which translates into relief, a brief reminder that, if only for a moment, we are not alone. In his sixth release, Swedish electro-prophet Gaspar Poet explores this theme across the nine tracks that shape up his latest record,
Beratna Sovaj. From the creole dialect, and wildly translating into something like “Brother Savage”, the idea aims to represent strangers as familiars, the same way we perceive and react to something like music, or not even that, just to sounds in their most primordial state. It’s a feeling that is universal, regardless of race or gender, and it’s something unique and fascinating.
Gaspar Poet materializes these concepts first through opener “Underfelt”, a synthetic overture heavily based on post rock, with a looming piano note marking the pace while the album unfolds like a sky clearing out after a storm. It sets the mood for the rest of the album: optimist melancholia, if we were to define it. “Hazzee” follows up, maybe my favorite part of the album, since I can’t make out where are these sounds coming from: a blend of organic and synthetic, of brushes on a snare that are, in reality, just an illusion, a sax cry bouncing around my head space while a lady’s voice comes and goes like a tiny wave splashing the shore. “Treetops” takes a more aggressive stance, with a bouncy dance bassy beat stomping the surface suggesting the perfect score for a night drive.
The mid-section of
Beratna Sovaj includes some of the Poet’s most intricate work, specially on “Low Orbit Fruit”, where two iterating samples float around for the whole duration of the track only intersecting at a very specific point at random, symbolizing the way we all cross paths as part of the fickle nature of life, and how that can mark and alter our route in ways impossible to predict. “Barn Owl Holographics” could work as a trip hop affair if vocals were thrown into the mix, but the author is bound to his vision and shimmering notes melt down the beat like wax down a candle.
The last section of the album is the largest in scope, with the somber tone of “The Eye” constructing its beat with a myriad of small industrial sounds playfully coming in and out of the canvas and the heavy tecno hammering that closes “Intangible” trying to steal the spotlight from the otherworldly soundscape expanding and stretching out. It slowly vanishes into “A Ghost Forthcoming”, the closing track and another piece that interweaves interesting ideas in the form of aleatory piano notes shining through the dominant patterns that paint the background, reminiscent of Brian Eno and his works with Harold Budd (RIP).
Beratna Sovaj is a carefully crafted piece of electronic music, an adventurous sonic journey through the mind of Gaspar Poet while he takes hold of you for a moment to vicariously experience your life through that instant where eyes cross or an essence wraps around your head after crossing someone on the street. It’s music that connects these whimsical moments in life that drives us into a given direction at a given time, in that seemingly never-ending quest of finding our own voice, or what truly represents us. For Gaspar Poet, such realization took sixth albums, but
Beratna Sovaj is his resolve made music, and maybe, why not... The beginning of your own journey to find yours.
