Swedish composer Shida Shahabi’s sophomore album, Living Circle, starts with a single decaying piano note. A close mic’d, felt-dampened, key, sustained, twisted, and turned, electronically. Linnea Olsson’s cello countering the resulting resonance and hum. 

Throughout this set of new pieces Shida’s playing is used to generate treated, tactile, “ambient” tones, delay, echoes, a distant ringing in the detail, while Linnea is allowed to take the melodic lead. On Deep Violet Of Gold, for example, her strings are cinematic, story-telling. While their tale is not exactly celebratory, if the mood is bruised, then it’s down but not yet out. Not melancholy, instead more suggestive of new beginnings, bluer skies on the horizon. Optimistic, but with battles still to be fought. Over its 9-minutes the composition evolves into an epic, as the machine-manipulations become more intense. Buzzing, blurring, burning the melody’s edge. Threatening to consume everything, and mirroring the emotive sonic shredding effect of label-mate Ian William Craig’s array of re-purposed tape decks and “cassette choir”.

The title track introduces choral harmonies. Ethereal at first, then rising to soar and swoon. On Aestus these help to create a solitary, haunted air, similar to that found on, say, Grouper’s Ruins.* Its reverberations the soundtrack to a stroll through a neglected memory palace. Deserted rooms, once full of laughter, now occupied only by dust-sheeted furniture. The album’s major achievement is just this, that it totally transports the deep listener into its own stand-alone, sound world. As each track segues seamlessly into the next, since they are all paintings from the same palette, you become locked, lost in its painstakingly constructed layers. Trapped within its intimate, intricate textures. 

Shida Shahabi’s Living Circle is out today, care of 130701.

Notes

*Ruins is another one of those records that I have cited 100s of times. A seminal piece of “ambient” introspection.