Martina Bertoni - Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone (Karl Records)

*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's February 25th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***

Don’t be put off by the rather dry, academic album title, this is a pretty cosmic electroacoustic journey, and the closest you’ll get to an ambient listen today. What elevates this recording above the ethereal competition, apart from Bertoni’s vision and ability, is the use of the halldorphone, an extremely responsive cello looking instrument that was designed to feedback the strings. It was invented in 2007, oddly by Halldór Úlfarsson, a visual arts student who isn’t a musician and doesn’t even play it. Luckily, Martina Bertoni alongside Sunn O))) and some acclaimed classical, avant-garde and soundtrack composing musicians do.

The recording consists of four tracks spanning fifty minutes and certainly sounds like a studio production where string playing and painstaking post recording processing have collided, but the fact that it’s all coming from classically trained cellist Bertoni’s live playing is pretty mind blowing. Ignoring her formal cello training she’s approached the string from different angles, creating feedback that itself creates feedback and seemingly infinite loop cycles. The results were then captured with two microphones, one for the drones and one for the strings.

The results are unfailingly mesmerising, the loops of varying prominence at times imagine Oriental mysticism decades from now, break new ground in electronic pointillism and forge new paths in drone science. Turn off your phone and sink into this one.