Hely - Borderland
SKU
34-Ronin 019 CD
Lucca Fries: piano
Jonas Ruther: drums
“The dense waves of intensity are no obstacle to the Hely duo of pianist Lucca Fries and drummer Jonas Ruther laying down some seriously hypnotic music. It’s the way that little melodic changes reveal themselves from within a dense fog of repetition that serve up one delightful moment after the other, and it’s the kind of thing that will transfix a person’s attention and almost make them oblivious to any dissonance or chaos in the surrounding area of a particular song… just out of anticipation of catching the next melodic reveal. The Swiss duo is pretty well immersed in the modern sound familiar to their region, and it’s their singular focus upon one aspect of it that really puts this album over the top.”-Bird Is The Worm
“Imagine a Rothko, from the Color Field Painting era: luminous, full of contrasts; layered, extremely saturated, yet all the while, deliberately restrained. An object which was designed to elicit a type of internal, compositional tension that is not only capable of triggering your latent emotions, but that can also invoke that, which can only be described as an expression of the sublime. Now, imagine this in musical form!
Borderland, the sophomore release from the Swiss piano and drums duo (with Lucca Fries, also known from the band Ikarus and Jonas Ruther) called HELY, is a collection of emotionally spiked compositions that sound like a series of intense, vivid, pictographic abstractions. A true feast for synaesthetics! It’s a record that reimagines the relationship between the piano and a set of drums and proposes a unique musical vernacular, one that fuses these two distinctly percussive instruments into an expansive, droning, polyrhythmic tapestry. The sound presented here could just as well be the bastard child of trance-inducing West African drumming traditions and the minimalistic, contemporary, European, post-classical and experimental sensibilities –if the two were to ever cross-pollinate and were presented in the form of an immersive soundtrack.”
- LabelRonin Rhythm
- UPC610098164067