As with anyone, I have been asked “what music I like” countless times. Increasingly, in encountering this question, I have thought to an old friend whom, when pressed on this score, responded: “I run the spectrum from melancholy to heavy.” He and I are quite alike, but it begs the question: what is so enjoyable about melancholy? For whatever reason, nigh-systematically, I seek out sound-scapes that engender emotional confusion. It is as if, wherever I don’t know how to feel, I feel most vividly.
Perhaps this is a by-product of my general persona, my love for challenges at every corner. Wherever I have discovered emotional spaces that do not make themselves immediately intelligible, I have lusted after repeated exposure in order to better understand. “Eventually”, so I tend to think, “I will see what the artist intended me to see.”
If nothing else, this explains why my favourite artists have tended to be those that I have hated at first pass. The Blood Brothers, Daughters, Kayo Dot, and the like, producing challenging works that alienate and seduce simultaneously. So it is natural that, whenever I have come around to understanding artists such as these, the rewards - intellectual and aesthetic - have been plentiful.
So comes Carla Dal Forno’s rather unassuming debut record. I should say that it would be an exaggeration, at least at such an early stage in her career, to exalt her by association with the aforementioned. Still, like the others, I am drawn to her for the polarized emotions she inspires. On the one hand, her music is marked by a consistently nefarious baseline; a vague yet enduring suggestion that something wicked cometh, though it never does. On the other hand, there is her care-free, earthy experimentalism, not so much the antithesis of the nefarious as its bizarre cousin. Emotional confusion abounds.
This contrast is perhaps never better achieved than between the record’s dissonant, electronic sample-driven opener “Italian Cinema”, and the subsequent “Fast Moving Cars” in which Dal Forno’s minimalist vocal stylings, nonchalant and entirely without concern for the future, make their first appearance. In oscillation, the record continues; one moment of discomfort, one moment of gloom, one moment of semi-muted childhood wonder, and back again. The album ends in an anti-climax, and rather successfully at that.
This is an ‘pop' record in spots, I suppose. It incorporates plenty of quiet drum work, bass, synthesizer, and dashes of pan flute. All the white Dal Forno sings unassumingly, as if she is never entirely present. A tactical decision, perhaps; one can only wonder what else she is capable of. The thought is tantalizing. She has not given us too much of herself yet. Between the seams of the music she tells us that she is capable of more. For now, however, her minimalism suggests a great deal of musical ingenuity. Less is sometimes more, and sometimes, less is just ‘more’ enough to leave lingering senses of both satisfaction and hunger.
