Tellavision
Add Land
For a decade Tellavision has been one of our most exciting sonic inventors, carving out her own inimitable style through her previous three albums, two EPs and countless tracks. New music abstractions echo against a backdrop of old Krautrock mechanical-motorik rhythms, allied to the physically gripping immediacy of techno and noise. Her concerts have consistently been nothing less than spectacular: she has sung and sampled beats from every imaginable and unimaginable variety of live percussion instruments; a loop station virtuoso, an engineer of a technically crafted musical "i" in which the innate and the alien mirror one another ad infinitum. "Add Land" marks a departure, a shift, a move towards a new horizon, "the coast is clear / add land from here". Tellavision has severed those connections which increasingly felt like constraints to her - the close link to machines, for example, the way her voice became entangled in electronic sounds. Now, her vocals occupy a clear space in the foreground, whilst she still chooses to add her own choral voice on some songs. The difference is that these choirs no longer blur her subjectivity, instead they serve to magnify or multiply it. No matter the flutters, shivers and doubts in the shadows, there is a new strength in evidence here, a new steadfastness in her music: "Add Land" is an upbeat, optimistic work, meeting the world head on.