Unlike the seemingly endless crop of darkwavers with weird keyboard characters for names, Silvia Konstance Costan and her partner in Dame Area, the Catalan underground veteran Victor Hurtado, stab at something less generic, delve deeper into the digitaris, to terpsichore something fresh from the industrialised skeleton.
Title track “Centro Di Gravitá” strikes the first blow with a hard-machined tribal to a reverbed Silvia, a rhythmically routed roast, ritually fed in elasticated envelopes. Orang-outangs of beat wrap those acrobatting abstracts of her voice, those funnel-webs of chorus anchoring some anti-political stance. The whippy plate steel of “Sfingi” is undercut in murmuring synths as Silvia’s spell-like hypnotics are deflected on a satisfying hard-edged paramilitary double cut and sequenced interference.
It’s hard to escape your heroes and “Ciclo Ritorna” throws a tasty homage in the direction of Throbbing Gristle. A post-industrialised insemination of wavey synth grouting the betweens, those ghostly modulators and carpet-bombed reverbs adding tasty trauma to the slinky sensuals.
The weird panthering of the last two tracks pay a nod to Franco Battiato‘s Sulle Corde di Aries LP. The sultry “Pluma Blanca” ends things on a struck-can sparsness and false keylines as Silvia’s melancholic intones slowly slide off the album’s diminishing groove.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
