Amiira – Curious Objects

Arjunamusic

After a lay-off of six years and much other activity, the trio of Klaus Gesing, Björn Meyer and Samuel Rohrer has returned as Amiira for a second album.

Clearly, although the interconnectedness of the players is as rich as before, they have chosen to take things in a more contemplative and languid manner, letting the music to reflect back on the listener, raising the beaded curtain and allowing them to peer through into their uniquely glazed realm.

Klaus’s bass clarinet drifts like smoke, the drums a quite slow shimmer just above the horizon while the bass sits in the middle observing, pointing out directions, its warm resonance washed by sun-kissed cymbals. The considered quality of the pieces here is welcome. It feels hushed, as if conscious of neighbours; yet there is something compelling about that reticence, the warm massage of bass and in the background a veiled gauze of electronics, giving a promise of more.

Klaus and Björn are credited with effects and Samuel with electronics and you can feel those elements filling in the spaces that those languorous tempos provide; but interestingly, the sense of restraint shown across the album is palpable and very much part of the aesthetic. You can almost feel them itching to push on further and at points when they do inject pace, as on the longform “Concentric”, the reeds don’t always want to join in and so continue their dreamy philosophising over a bed of cyclical insistence, stretched to hypnotic lengths.

In other places, only a minute and a half or so is needed to sow a seed in the listener’s ear; the beatless atmosphere of “Nostalgia” inhabits its own universe. Once the effect is accomplished, they move onto the next thing, be it the processionary drums and narrative soprano arc of “Gravity Inn”, its instrumental woodland tale as descriptive as any poem, or the amorphous and more disturbing sound world of “Refraction Of Glass”, the reeds hovering disconcertingly as the bass notes appear and explode, chasing something invisible to us.

Although there is an overall languid feel to Curious Objects, it is never melancholy; and if anything, there is a warmth which is epitomised by the final track ‘Where We Go From Here”, which has a soporific, early morning vibe. That feeling of new love after a sleepless night, that first flush of romance, the thrill tempered by pleasant fatigue; a view across the downs looking into a misty sunrise and an unknown future.

-Mr Olivetti-