RENE HELL - Porcelain Opera (Album of the week)

RENE HELL - Porcelain Opera (Type) Comentários: The newest addition to the Type roster is one Rene Hell, a cult underground noisenik better known as Jeff Witscher. His numerous releases and pseudonyms for labels including Arbor, Not Not Fun and Chronditic Sound (among a tonne of others) have given space for his untamed imagination to roam various disparate styles and ideas. For Rene Hell Witscher sort of places himself alongside Emeralds or Oneohtrix Point Never with alter-dimensional synth trips referencing classic kosmiche, but with the lustre of nostalgia picked away to reveal a decidedly modern grasp of electronic psychedelia. Much like his peers, he manages to envelope his archaic source sounds with a forward thinking sensibility that's conscious of developments which occurred between the early 70s and the early 10s, allowing him to avoid the pitfalls of kitsch, but play around with more honest cliche. Hell maps out a patch that focusses and aligns the visions of Cluster into Basic Channel while adding his own special enzymes to catalyse unpredictable psilocybic changes, a controlled but near-random factor liable to spew out tape chewed voices and dart off into tangential black holes or bloom into star burst harmonics like a box of illicit Chinese fireworks. Eschewing the constrictions of software programming, Hell's intuitive hardware approach enhances these possibilities, take the album centre piece 'L.Minx' as the prime example, where the central synthline shudders and spasms in an electrical storm of distorted, blackened blows, before diverging and converging within the stereo field to defuse and reconnect your cerebral hemispheres with devilishly studied efficiency. A noisenik's sense of freedom gives him license to create textures and tones which would likely be frowned upon in the original Kosmiche scene, but here on 'Razor. P+' they mark the track with a modernist aesthetic that puts history to good use and thrills us in the process. Witscher's synth gospels are more than just a flash in the pan and proves that there's still much terrain to be covered in the recently remembered lands of pure analogue synth music. Very highly recommended. in boomkat [Para Ouvir/Samples]