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Freida Abtan, "Subtle Movements"
Released with the help of United Dairies and Jnana Records, Freida Abtan's music is a strange cinematography of metaphysical conundrums and invisible events. Contained herein is time frozen, inspected, and unwoven into infinite threads of unusual shapes and proportions. Abtan's subtle flourishes are impressive, sometimes simultaneously fantastic and terrifying, but they do not add up to a wholly consistent album.
United Jnana
Abtan's sounds are magical and transportive; their vivid fidelity and unequivocal crispness weave particular narratives with no small degree of confidence. From the beginning her work is organic, sounding less like music and more like the recorded adventures of an entrepreneurial and esoteric detective probing the deepest recesses of haunted caverns and finding hidden worlds tucked away there. In this way the title of her album reflects its content; that which is hidden, unnoticed, or too subtle is brought to the fore by Abtan's careful arrangements and given a detailed survey. An entire spectrum of insectoid percussion and globular synthetics are revealed in her compositions, their microscopic lives brought to life by gusts of electricity and storming spirits trapped behind a veil of static and other interference. What Abtan does best on Subtle Movements is construct a believable world of sounds, each unique and absorbing in their various depictions. She's captured the megalomaniacal rituals of a modern electrical shaman on tape, teased from the air the tortured confessions of a now reformed specter, and ploughed the ether in order to return a report of all its miniscule interactions.
What she hasn't done is found a convincing way to tie all the imagery together. Subtle Movements is split into 12 uneven portions, some of them only a minute and a half in length, the longest, "Shimmer and Dissolve," stretching just beyond 20 minutes. Many of the pieces feel as though they could endure for at least as long as "Shimmer and Dissolve" does. When "The Works and Days of Hands" comes to an end, it is too soon. This would all be a tiny complaint, but there are also cases where the flow from one track to the next is inconsistent, causing the album to feel a bit bumpy where a more considerate transition would've made for a more immersive album. That seems to be the name of Abtan's game after all: these are all worlds of movement, detailed expressions of everything that goes on beneath any surface that are meant to consume the listener and erase whatever is going on beyond the reach of headphones or speakers. If this were meant to be a collection of odds and ends such a complaint wouldn't exist, but I feel as though there was meant to be a serious read thread running through this album, it simply disappears too often into the concentrated slices of abstraction.
On the other hand, Abtan is clearly talented and massively creative. Each of the individual tracks contain clear evidence of a careful and thoughtful musician with no shortage of great ideas. It will simply take an emphasis on the bigger picture to make the entire project as alluring as the parts.
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