Review Summary: Urban Space and Electronic Music - Part I: Aerial Voyeur-Gods
This short series is dedicated to charting the relationship between electronic music and urban space. As a theme, it's not remotely original – you'll have come across the
modern soundtrack for modern spaces line however many times – but rather than being put off by its use as a generic parallel, I wanted to use it to explore a small handful of records on their own terms, together with the very distinct perspectives they offer on city space. Perhaps it would have been more inspired to write about electronic albums that evoke the countryside or nature more generally, but we can always go there next time.
Anyway, Illuvia (aka Ludvig Cimbrelius)'s
Earth Prism is first on the list because it suggests city space on such a vast scale that the level of individual human experience disappears entirely. Its periodic breakbeat flurry hearkens back to the city in all its rush, bustle and intricate mesh of connections, but these come shrouded in so many layers of gauzy ambience that we experience them as though from the other side of a cloud canopy, as though the city itself is a sprawling, protruding geographical
thing glimpsed as though from the window of an aeroplane, as though each crashing snare is the distant echo of a raindrop heard splashing against an invisibly small head or a miniature car roof far, far below.
This spectacle-heavy approach sacrifices any hands-on appeal the album might have had – the swell and crash of these beats is rarely the kind of thing that will inspire you to move your body – but Cimbrelius more than makes up for this with the scope of his panorama.
Earth Prism is dizzying in its altitude, vertiginous in its perspective; listening to it puts me in the shoes of a lonesome sky deity as estranged from the minutiae of the world below as the
voyeur-god of the city planner in Michel de Certeau's famous essay
Walking in the City (where the top-down, aerial view of the city is simply an administrative device, a visual concept that scarcely intersects with the living, human reality of street-level navigation).
And yet,
Earth Prism's chief appeal is not its giddy expanse but its moments of precipitation. The album's emphasis on negative space and vaporous textures is so pronounced that its beats play more frequently as a backdrop to its ambient canopy than the other way around, but when the percussion finally bursts through the haze on the likes of "Vale of Shadows", it brings the rapture of thunder splintering the heavens apart and sending a squall pelting down on the city mass below; just for a moment, our sky perch braces against the same shock as will be felt on the streets, and
something, however fleeting and tenuous, connects our two worlds. The feeling is electric, and save for the cumbersome midway duo of "Empire to Dust" and "Nereides", Cimbrelius does well to sustain the whole record by gradually preempting and delicately diffusing it in turn. Whether he'd agree with my urban charting is another matter – he credits the album's inspirations to a more abstract duality of light and matter, which I find at once less evocative and less interesting – but the bottom line is that you'll find no finer album than this from which to experience a panoramic urban vista from the inside of a raincloud.
Urban Space and Electronic Music
[url=https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/89637/Illuvia-Earth-Prism]Part 1: Illuvia - Earth Prism[/url]
[url=https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/89758/Blue-Planet-Corporation-Blue-Planet]Part 2: Blue Planet Corporation - Blue Planet[/url]
