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Lovesliescrushing, "Crwth (Chorus Redux)"
While perhaps known better for their lush, hazy guitar abstractions, the duo of Melissa Arpin-Duimstra and Scott Cortez are not afraid to push their sound even further into the reaches of the sonic galaxy, as this new reconstruction proves. Originally issued on a tiny Peruvian label in 2007, Chorus was a conscious attempt to remove guitars and instrumentation, and simply work with the sound of Arpin-Duimstra’s voice. For its reissue, the entire album is reworked yet again, using the tiniest of vocal fragments to weave a beautiful atmospheric tapestry of sound.
As expected from its development, the sound of Crwth is one that is more treated and distilled than its Chorus predecessor which, thankfully, is included as a free download, along with three additional reworked tracks that wouldn’t fit on the disc. The original material is closer in spirit to the band’s earlier work, though still full of cut and paste phonemes and what must be vocal snippets run through guitar effects pedals. While sounding very unlike their peers, there are still significant traces of a sound influenced by the likes of MBV, just with even less consideration for the conventional structures of pop music.
The new material allows Melissa’s natural voice to shine through at times, but the greater focus is on dismantling the syllables and breaths she provides into a variety of sounds, some which mimic traditional instruments, others which have no discernable origin. The opening "Dzai" leaves her gentle vocals out in the open, with little in the way of processing other than layering, which later surges into a sustained tone, with small phonemes morphing into a rhythmic click while others are processed into cello like low register swells of sound. "Vrhhu" allows the beautiful vocals to appear untreated, resembling a gentle, wordless lullaby as other bits of her voice are done up to sound like strings, providing a soft, gauzy bed for her angelic voice to rest upon. "Rhvr" also chooses to showcase the voice, with only the most subtle of reverberation and processed sonic punctuation to flesh out the sound.
In other cases, the voice is used simply as a starting point, and the outcome resembles something else entirely: "Glnkq" sounds much more like a complex synthesizer or laptop based composition, with its looped low frequency rhythmic pulse and shimmering pseudo-horn passages, and the cold minimalism of "Qlinglo," which channels distant strings and indefinable bassy frequencies. Even with little resemblance to its source material, few things other than the human voice can be capable of rendering such loneliness and despair that is captured on "Shemerr." While the palette that the sound is drawn from isn’t clear, the heavy emotions it conveys are rarely captured by anything other than the human voice.
When I first saw this listed on the upcoming release list from Line, I was a bit shocked. I knew the name sounded familiar, and a quick bit of research confirmed my instinct that Lovesliescrushing was a band associated more with the 1990s ethereal pop/gothic movement than anything else. Hell, they had releases on the Projekt label, definitely not something I would have seen as fitting in with this label’s preference for clinical and installation based compositions. However, the material here does fit in with the Line ethos, it just happens to have more of an organic core than many, such as myself, were expecting. The final product is a simply beautiful set of pieces that is consistent with the explorations in sound motive of electronic artists, but with a natural beauty and grace that few are able to mimic with their laptops and complex software.
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