Review Summary: Sweet Trip I: fish swim in the see[feel]
Halica plays out exactly the way a good origin story should: simply constructed, full of promise, endearing both in its inspirations and imperfections, and full of the same character that would shape even the most ambitious of its creators’ future undertakings. In many ways it was an unassuming start for Sweet Trip; their lauded opus
Velocity : Design : Comfort would juggle IDM, indietronica, dream pop, glitch and shoegaze in a Herculean feat of fusion, but
Halica is a reserved affair that confines itself to Seefeel-esque ambient techno with occasional percussive flourishes, something along the lines of vintage post-rock pulled off with the language of IDM. Relative to practically everything else Roberto Burgos, Valerie Cooper and friends have done since, this practically a minimalist album, but rather than empty space, it’s full of smart layerings, trim arrangements and the kind of atmospheres that make it a seventh heaven for prospective daydreamers.
Not the cheap kind of daydreams, mind you - there are no
another coffee would be nice-s here - but the profound kind you have when you are unexpectedly reminded of your mostly forgotten childhood home, only to experience a beautiful but slightly unsettling recollection of vivid details about how young your parents once were and how incapable you used to be at expressing yourself and how amazing and retrospectively heartbreaking it is that you once had access to a garden that looked like that, and the next thing you know, you’re riding the memory because it’s more meaningful and enticingly detailed than anything else currently scratching your synapses. That’s the kind of [sweet] trip on offer here; sometimes I have daydreams about listening to
Halica, at which point any concurrent daydreams I have on the go get a little more intense, regardless of their cheapness or profundity.
In other words, there are potent layerings at work here, none moreso than the stunning opener “Fish.” Once the group’s staple track, this song remains the benchmark for Sweet Trip’s atmospheric side. Pieced together from restless, skittering beats, shimmering synthscapes, lingering guitar melodies and Valerie Cooper’s breathy vocalises, it covers the kind of runtime and dynamic range traditionally reserved for grandiose epics. However, its ethereal arrangement and blissfully fluid dynamics rise and fall so naturally that its timeframe feels entirely arbitrary - this song could be album-length and the experience would hardly change. It’s the kind of track that makes you feel so small that you stare deeply into space and momentarily forget that you ever occupied the physical plane. It feels like finding and losing something at the same time, combining human and mechanical elements in such a way that it’s constantly ambiguous which is the dominant party. On this basis, it’s the prototype for everything Sweet Trip would do with electronic music, but the track’s freeform mystique is an entity to itself. As testament to this, “Fish” never once breaks into irregularity, despite the fact that the complexity of its beats and the shifting development of its momentum capture a similar quality to the group’s later forays into glitch. Seamlessly constructed and beautifully performed, it captures a rare feeling of purity and wonder, living proof of the transportive power of music that freezes time and snatches me away no matter how jaded my mindset may be going in. Few pieces can claim as much, and “Fish” stands as a perfect example of why it is appropriate to label music as
atmospheric in the first place.
While “Fish” is charmingly shapeless in its ebb and flow, the closer “Jelly Charm” takes a more robust approach, orienting itself around a two-bar synth hook. The melody in question is at once relaxing and mysterious, the kind you’d associate with a character presented in superficially peaceful circumstances, yet haunted by some half-forgotten worry that they can neither pin down nor let go of; a detective in their apartment questioning why a case they once thought solved is still hovering around their mind. The arrangement supports this sense of engaging with the nebulous, weaving together a patient bassline, an evasive male vocalise (the vocalises on this album are godlike), glitches so smoothly integrated you likely won’t refer to them as such, and a beat that at some points drives the song’s momentum and at others hovers around its periphery like it’s periodically checking its pulse. It’s an entrancing snapshot of unresolved reflection that waves away its eight-minute runtime like a peripheral detail foisted upon it by the pedants, and by the end of the track that ever-repeating hook will be stuck in the back of your mind, fulfilling its undertone of why-can’t-I-let-go-of-this. If “Fish” is an elating erosion of the confines of whatever listening environment the album’s audience finds themselves in, then “Jelly Charm” plants deceptively morose seeds of misgiving in advance of their imminent return to reality.
Although more minimal than their later masterpieces, these two tracks showcase the essence of what Sweet Trip does best. The group are competent in whichever individual styles they reach for, but their mastery has always lain in their fluid exchange of diverse timbres and combination of disparate ends. These tracks show off this approach at its most expansive and organic, foregoing samples and layering originally recorded vocal and guitar tracks over an electronic skeleton. While later efforts would introduce disarming new sounds from seemingly out of nowhere,
Halica contents itself with a narrower palette and draws its vitality from constantly shifting the balance of its core layers; the manner in which this repeatedly inflects the momentum of each piece without compromising its overall tone is ultimately what sustains the album.
This nuanced balancing act represents the best of Sweet Trip; their worst, appropriately enough, fails to strike the same equilibrium and ends up as an amorphous hodgepodge.
Halica’s sparse aesthetic leaves it vulnerable to this in ways that, say, the comparatively mobile
Velocity : Design : Comfort lowlight “Pro : Lov : Ad” was not: both “Starlife” and “Traces” are complacent in their efforts to evoke an immersive atmosphere by draping themselves in a haze of guitar layerings and vocal tracks that owe more to reverb filtering than the human larynx. Neither of these feel actively
wrong, but these tracks have little enough going for them that their moods and stylings wear thin; sequenced back to back, they make for the album’s least memorable stretch. The remaining three tracks, “Pulse”, “Follow Me” and “Come to Me” all feel like less sophisticated unpackings of the airiness presented on “Fish”; though not as intricate or breathtaking, they flesh out the album’s middle section convincingly enough. The former two benefit from a metallic sheen on their beats, a quality unique to this album that gives it a welcome pinch of the superficial razzle-dazzle that future outings would pack more generously.
In its own way,
Halica is just as much a voyage of discovery as
Velocity : Design : Comfort, but while the latter album benefitted from an endlessly striking mish-mash of sonic possibilities,
Halica is a more reflective and, admittedly, far less immediately exciting experience that demands a patient mindset to suss out its most engaging qualities - or perhaps it was just destined for the daydream gang. In any case, the best of this album is up with the best of Sweet Trip and a must for any fans of ambient techno, indietronica or ’90s post-rock. As for those partial to the spacier side of
Velocity (“Velocity”, “Sept”, “International” etc.), you might just owe it to yourself to cover your tracks and suss out where it all came from.
Halica is a real one.
