Sophia Loizou - Untold '2020

Tracks list

Jungle deconstructionist Sophia Loizou materializes on planet Houndstooth for
her third album Untold, a multi-disciplinary project that includes an AV show, a
lecture, special artwork and a book of poems. 

Bristol-based academic, author and sound artist Sophia Loizou impressed with her
first two albums, 2014s Chrysalis and 2016s acclaimed Singulacra. Both records
filtered a deep knowledge of dance music through opaque clouds of drone and
ambient noise, re-contextualizing familiar sounds while reducing them to digital
dust. Singulacra found its footing in jungle, exploring the genres woozy
euphoria in ways not a million miles from Lee Gambles Diversions, transforming
driving rhythms into ghostly echoes and faint memories.

Untold is a further development of these ideas, taking the skeletal approach of
Singulacra and building it into a many-headed multi-disciplinary project. Here,
Loizou bills her tracks as a series of speculative sonic landscapes letting the
natural world inform the sound in attempt to remove it from humanity. So the icy
breaks, rolling subs and ethereal pads are now informed and shaped by natural
dynamics: a lions roar or the rhythm of a dolphins echolocation emissions, reads
the press release.

This isnt something thats likely to be immediately discernible to most listeners
but the concept def raises an eyebrow or three. No doubt the project is most
enjoyable with its full AV presentation - as it stands though, Untold is an
accurate representation of the progressive commodification of breaks and ambient
music. The familiar sounds are omnipresent, but the driving force of jungle has
been dislocated: breaks are left to fizz into muted impotence and melodies dance
and tease, refusing to resolve comfortably. By attempting to remove the musics
human element, Loizou has come eerily closer to the algorithmic uncanny valley
of a Spotify playlist or a generative videogame soundtrack. Ambient jungle to
relax/study to, maybe?

Tracklisting:
01. Sophia Loizou - Anima (3:50)
02. Sophia Loizou - Celestial Web (5:36)
03. Sophia Loizou - Vestal Waters (5:11)
04. Sophia Loizou - Inner Dreams (5:06)
05. Sophia Loizou - Fluxes (3:29)
06. Sophia Loizou - Hypnotik (4:00)
07. Sophia Loizou - Sylphonia (4:40)
08. Sophia Loizou - Bicameral (5:38)
09. Sophia Loizou - Apeiros (3:32)

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