Iris Garrelfs came to light through a series of high
profile collaborations with artists as diverse as Scanner,
Si-Cut.db, Freeform,
Kaffe Matthews and Robert Lippock. She's had her work
featured on compilations for Bip-Hop, Law & Auder,
ECR and Sprawl. She is also very involved with Sprawl,
the organisation set up by Si-Cut.db’s
Douglas Benford, which gives young artists the opportunity
to play in live in London during regular events, and
she has been known to step in behind the mixing desks
to DJ at various locations in London, and, to complete
the picture, she’s also had her photographs published
in countless magazines around the world, including The
Wire, The Face, Muzik and Marie-Claire to name but a
few. Yet, she was still to release her first album.
Thanks to French label Bip-Hop, this is now done.
Collecting seven tracks, all built around Garrelfs’s
voice as sole source, Specified Encounters
is a magnificent and haunting debut album. The concept
of using the human voice as only sound source and incorporating
it within an electronic context, if not new, remains
in the best cases truly fascinating. On Specified
Encounters, Garrelfs develops her live improvs
to create an extremely varied and contrasted record.
Extremely versatile in her approach, as she uses anything
from raw recordings to extremely processed and textured
elements, Garrelfs assembles subtle sonic pieces evoking
various atmospheric settings. Left at least partially
untitled, simply sequenced from Encounter 1-7,
the tracks presented here denote very complex soundscapes,
ranging from hypnotic loops to haunting incantations,
ethereal waves and glitches, tightly interwoven to form
dense structures on which sparse melodies flourish.
Over the forty-two minutes of this album, Garrelfs investigates
peaceful sonic plains (Encounter 1, 3,
7), and more organic and abrasive surfaces
(Encounter 2, 5, 6) with
equal virtuosity, casting a constant shadow over her
compositions yet remaining somehow in the background.
Despite the human intervention and the use of human
sounds, the electronic make up of this record remains
proudly exposed in the foreground. Yet, it is kept totally
versatile and fresh by Garrelfs’s fluid touch.
Garrelfs uses this context to develop a series of subtle
compositions to perfection. Specified Encounters
more than fulfils the promises of Garrelfs’s part
work.
4.7/5 |
