Music is inescapably married to time. A lyric unveiling a sequence of words to form a story, or the beat driving from instance to instance, or a texture expanding into space, as the listener is carried forward, second by second.
More than anything, at OBLADADA, this sense of music taking you on some form of journey is at the heart of our sonic enjoyment. Music that starts in one place and drops you off somewhere different. A self-contained, portable, and infinitely repeatable nuanced experience.
This new album Paréidolie by Nantes based quartet Speltereni, spectacularly sits in this zone that draws you into the exhilarating details of forward propulsion. Paréidolie’s 33-minute span straddles the illusionary space between motorik ecstasy and droning endlessness.
Growing out a warm gently fluctuating drone, drums slowly gather before locking into a near metronomic pattern. At a pace that’s just enough to suggest incremental development the whole thing then slowly marches into a ragged, ever more insistent version of itself. Rising out of some venn diagram of NEU!, Stereolab and ultimately for us, Pluramon’s spectacular first album Pick Up Canyon, and marches towards an exhilarating point of origin.
After a blistering 22 minutes, suddenly the gravity is switched off like the fuel tanks finally getting jettisoned as outer space is reached… A dynamic and rhythmic mesh is still in place, but the scale has flipped into forms that will take far longer to reveal themselves.
The album’s title Paréidolie references pareidolia – a tendency to see patterns, objects and meaning from nebulous stimulus. So, in a way, much here plays with the idea of making sense in variations and repeating illusionary patterns.
At the heart of this stunning album is a startling contradiction – our brains spotting the static nature of much of what is presented whilst simultaneously being seduced by minute fluctuations and accelerations.
Somehow, despite its apparent simplicity, and relatively brief footprint, Speltereni take the listener into a weird time warp inside the very fabric of music.
Paréidolie is out on October 4, find out more here
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