[Reviewed by: Iaha Crax]
Äärvö seems to integrate within its music a line followed by the famous GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris. This centre for contemporary music was found by Pierre Schaeffer back in the sixties, the most famous member was Iannis Xenakis.
The album that is mysteriously developing before the eyes came out this year and it is going to be released physically on cassette. It might just be the most suitable choice for the music of Äärvö. Tape format captures an unique vibe of frankness and liberty, it is the image of the bastard admired secretly and loathed openly regardless of the caste.
Äärvö links the post-techno ambient to the analogue roots of these modern contemporary sounds. The French creator of the project intended his album to become a search for a synthesis beyond the shapes the sound can take when one makes room for it to flow independently. Passing through the immensely visceral “Bourbier” and the Dadaist rave attack “Invasion” to the caliginous Coil-like “Locust, espoir” and then facing this tangible, dark and desperate march “Catastrophe”, the richly baroque ornaments placed with such a rigour exactly on the right spot make out a cultivated personal style that is sure to arouse interest in versatile listeners.
The sounds of Äärvö are sneaking at small pace inside, in hunks they feed on, take the strength out of this possessed spirit and reshape a vision which was not the one they found therein. The bestiary of images is tunnelled from surrealistic approaches on the text, the track “Des arraignées qui volent” almost hypnotises, like a snake paralysing its victim. Such movement of circular devouring, a certain magic rite of dispossession, is a mark for industrial music settled on the power of looping and minimalist composition. The way it is being treated this technique makes a whole difference, hear “Ascension par le Sacrifice”, that like the other tracks here, suggests this dervish-whirling upon which one renounces at his personality for a certain amount of time. Not being you is the first degree of openness to a possible you in the realm that music of Äärvö is constructing.
This album is planned to be released on tape, this fall, at Le Tombeau des Muses, a label coming from France, the country which ranked the bizarre as a form of beauty. “Onde/Echarde”, the homonym track, perhaps is the pinpoint of the record not for the expression but because its strangeness and abusive abstract nature. Some kind of lure for the lugubrious that makes it impossible to cope with the calling of the blood. You can get a preview of the album and other recordings at the bandcamp page https://aarvonoise.bandcamp.com/, however a select mechanism of insight suggest to grab the tape, physical format and a proper enzyme to accelerate that which slumbers inside.
Äärvö – Onde / Écharde
Le Tombeau Des Muses
MC/Digital 2018
Santa Sangre 