By way of a complete coincidence our promo for this new album by P.M. Tummala arrived in Scotland during an extended period of clear blue skies and unseasonal warm garden days. As September tipped into October, the reddening leaves of our apparent Indian Summer has been met by an equally impeccable soundtrack…
Abstractions in Meera could be seen as a slow evolution of Tummala’s previous release – Brindavan Mon Amour, but this new collection feels somehow even more woozily perfect. Built of gently unfocussed blocks of sound and texture, it’s spun into a sublime mental mist that we’ve regularly looped for huge chunks of our days.
This latest release from label Monastral comes in their standardised format of duo-toned graphics, consistent typography and layered photographic patterning, which gives every release a sense they are all part of a suite of compatible moods, cross fertilised ideas, and strategies. Despite the broad ambient nature of sounds collected on Abstractions in Meera, somehow the forms often configure into tremendously dreamy arcs towards a genuinely psychoactive form of music.
Meera Post-Awakening is like sunbeams slowly burning through fog bound water. Flutes circling like dragonflies zooming above the surface as distant activity thrums and clatters away like a procession just out of view. The illusion grows intensively in the marvellous pulsations of It’s Still Around Us. Somehow, again, the setting is dream-like but the shadows and details gather into a filmic, orchestral smears through banks of effect-soaked space. The feeling here is like a suggestion of events brimming with timeless emotion, shapeshifting between daydream and hallucination.
Nighttime Modern feels like a drift over the city, puddles of streetlights, veins of traffic and activity slowly expanding towards an inky horizon. Beginners in Strata hangs in space before slowly encrusted in a ceremony of drums, horns, and heatstroke. Kumari is the fiery glow of closed eyelids caught in the scorching sun…
It’s easy to conceptually connect P.M. Tummala’s Indian heritage to loads of what we pleasantly drift through here. It’s also perfectly reasonable to describe much here as ambient, but the album is loaded with enough heft to convey a far greater sense of some psychedelic paradise.
Abstractions in Meera is high quality dream music – and there is something hugely potent and generously laced throughout its numerous brain-tickling folds.
Abstractions in Meera available digitally and as a limited edition cassette on Monastral_
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