Perila - Intrinsic Rhythm - double album out 8. Nov

With her second album for Oslo’s Smalltown Supersound, the St. Petersburg-born, Berlin-based sound and visual artist, DJ, poet and performer Perila takes aim at the harnessing rhythms both internal and external with a format-specific double album with 21 discrete compositions.

In terms of medium, Intrinsic Rhythm is fundamentally a double album. However, it is less like the classic conceptual 70s variety and more like the outsider-experimental 90s double album, such as Royal Trux’s Twin Infinitives or Lake by R!!!S!!. Clocking at 64 minutes, Perila opts for more tracks with less playing time, eschewing long-format psychedelic exploration for more potent, condensed blocks of ecstatic introspection interspersed by a sonic palette cleansing of five-second breaks in between.

The result is an album of rhythmic ambient, spectral electronics and intimate vocal exploration that strikes an elusive balance between intentional and aleatoric elements; between the rhythms and melodies generated and those harnessed from the environment; between abstract melody and concrete language; and between the complexities of life and spiritual regeneration.

From the beginning the scene is set through ethereal synth work and field recordings of overlapping voices and overlapping cow bells (“Sur”), inviting the listener to observe a constant push-pull of music as generator of spiritual meaning and physical well-being – not unlike the holistic artistic output of the late Milford Graves. The texture of tape hiss, low volume whirring and rhythmic guttural crackling provide a near constant meditative foundation for the distant vocals and modulating bell sounds that pervade the sound worlds of tracks such as “Nia” and “Ways”. These are accompanied by ASMR-inducing sonics, forwards-backwards melodies and hallucinatory atmospheres where subtle sonic acts expand endlessly into atmospheric horizons.

An increasing emphasis on voice emerges halfway through the double album, where compositions such as “Angli”, “Supa Mi” and “Fey” offer a stripped down vocal minimalism paired with an elegiac clicks and cuts percussion in an even more intimate – and internal –soundscape.  Specifically, the internal-external tension reemerges in the album’s final quarter in the vulnerable and no-frills sound-memo like recordings, where the pace of footsteps and noisy handling of a microphone (“Darbounouse Song”) or the spontaneous percussion of everyday objects and distant singing tease out the resonant frequencies of spaces and things we inhabit but often overlook, as on album closer “Ol Sun”.

Ultimately, the two vinyl are conceived in dialogue with one another, where they can be played together in a musical conversation between the inner and outer worlds. Additionally, the division of the four vinyl sides represent stages of becoming, matter and textures of life as soil, soul, air and ground.

In this sense, Intrinsic Rhythm is a reminder that external ecosystems provide a constant and often chaotic source of melody and rhythm in the frequencies and tempos of daily life; the whirring, sputtering, pitter-pattering, billowing, honking, tapping and languaging of objects organic and inorganic. Inwardly, these combine with the intangible rhythms of consciousness and internal organs. Perila explores a precisely the balance between sounds passively perceived and the music actively generated from them; it is deceleration and observation as musical gesture. In Perila’s own words: “In the process of working on this album I found that my own intrinsic rhythm – the one which centers and grounds me –is slow, way slower than life today wants us to be. When you slow down you can notice all the mesmerizing beauty and capture the sound world differently. For me, making it was a truly spiritual journey of meeting and accepting who I really am and how i can be in this world.”