CORNELiA – Cruising
aaamusic | On 04, Jun 2015
Until now, Cornelia has been vaguely floating about with a number of collaborations, singles and relatively recent features in the works of Portico Quartet and Bonobo. After 15 years of musical releases, she’s now anticipating the release of her debut album Balun with ‘Cruising’, a dusky journey that sonically separates itself from the inventively coloured and thoughtfully textured songs (in which existed a sensible flurry of sound) of Cornelia’s past.
‘Cruising’ comes across as a sort of manifesto for this LP. The tone is subdued, welcoming Cornelia’s silken voice in a way which suggests that her time spent working with Bonobo and kin was not taken for granted; the melding of her voice and the lushly produced minimal arrangement creates a compelling sense of lucidity within a dreamy soundscape.
Submerged in milky components, the subdued aesthetic throughout is kept interesting by a structure that avoids a verse/chorus approach and instead plays around a refrain which itself is made so tantalising by the incorporeal quality of Cornelia’s voice. Around the midpoint of ‘Cruising’, the synths that were previously jittering and morphing disappear, leaving in their wake the percussive elements adorned in the soothing yet subtly shrill and acutely dissonant sound of her voice as well as the water-drop effects that decorate the fringes of the composition.
The plush and pulsing chord progression throughout comes complete with an EQ that slides, phrase by phrase, from emphasising the sub bass to the top end of the synth tones that permeate most of ‘Cruising’. All the while, Cornelia expertly alters the timbre and relative harmony of her voice so that it becomes more refined (or unrefined) over the sustaining of a note. It all comes together for a dark and rather lovely listening experience that refuses to grow stale on repeat listens.
