- Meditations on the body-as-archive, delivered in sibilant spoken word and an unpredictable mélange of techno and IDM.
- The Zoé Chauvet portraits that make up the photobook for ALTÆR, a two-part project that includes Talita Otovic's cassette tape of the same name, are often shrouded in a multicoloured haze. This obscurity is intentional. The images, featuring Chauvet's friends—one short-haired and mean-mugging, wearing an Adidas tracksuit, another with a disembodied hand superimposed with splotches of auburn and cyan—were meant to capture ever-fluid states of identity. Together, these photos transform the artist's friends into living archives that honour bodies in flux, and their stories. "Alter represents the mutation of bodies and minds, the reflection of ourselves in others. Altar is a mystical place of illumination and of sacrifice," the publication's description reads. Together, the words intersect to create altær.
Otovic gets this concept across musically with scathing poetry, searing techno and idle IDM. On "Liquid Acid Placid," she collaborates with Paulo Gatabase who also performs with her as Otto+Gata. After an introduction of sizzling acid lines and muffled kicks, Gatabase's voice bellows deep and menacing, "Silence is the ultimate form of violence / It is also the nicest thing I can do." The bane of the lyricist might be difficult to locate—on "Get Well Soon," it appears to be as broad and existential as one's mere existence: "Life is a disease / Get well soon." But his acerbic words always arrive on time, casting a dark, alluring shadow across the glitchy expanse framing it—distorted guitar and elysian pads swirling into space.
This weightlessness fuels the majority of the mixtape's production. The rounded notes on "Body In The Night Sky" ping like a colourful set of musical Christmas tree lights, growing more distorted as the song moves along, as if the music box had finally worn out after years of use. On "Redemption," notes teeter upwards with the snow-capped optimism of Caterina Barbieri's sprawling compositions. These meditations come to life most extensively in "Divergent Pattern Derealized Ballad," which opens with a melody that travels like a string of lights in the indigo sky, before being chopped up by breaks and the heavy, pummelling thrum of techno. Metal pans clatter, wildcats roar. It's wide-eyed fantasy and industrial mayhem that speaks to the revered bodies of ALTÆR, which are described by Chauvet and Otovic as the north node to unfathomable realities, as well as their inevitable destruction.
By the album's final sermon, "I Wish They Knew I Left," Gatabase implies that as some worlds have been built, others have been destroyed. Bleeps angle themselves in the crevices of his words, and he admits that he's a ghost haunting himself. The track's quiet bubble implodes into countless fractals, subsumed once more into ferocious kick drums. It's a grand moment that feels larger than life itself. It sounds like our connection to each other, the past, the future and everything that exists in between.
Tracklist01. Liquid Acid Placid feat. Paulo Gatabase
02. Redemption
03. Sunday 10 Times
04. Divergent Pattern Derealized Ballad (live)
05. Body In The Night Sky
06. Spiky Crystals
07. Get Well Soon feat. Paulo Gatabase
08. I Wish They Knew I Left feat. Paulo Gatabase