The record Sorry Gold (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 279-2) is a small part of a much larger visual project which was staged at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in 2019, to interpret and express the work of film-maker Emily Aoibheann, an event which seems to have involved not just the showing of a film but also stage design and dancers. What we hear on today’s record though is the singing voice of Michelle O’Rourke and the electronic music of Gintas K, and the label are already making claims for the record to be perceived as a soundtrack and a stand-alone piece.
I never saw the original Dublin piece, but from online reviews I learn that Emily Aoibheann is an aerialist, which I take to be a more artistic / performance version of the kind of entertainment we used to get from trapeze artists at the circus. Sorry Gold was a dance piece for sure, but the reviewer was impressed by the costumes and masses of coloured fabric floating in the air, into which performers can mysteriously disappear. Aoibheann is convinced that “aerial”, as she styles her craft, is the “dance of industrial technology”, and her piece intends to communicate certain truths about civilisation and nature. Faint traces – very faint – of the original dancers can be seen printed on the digipak of Sorry Gold. Interestingly, the music here has been in part derived from the music of Monteverdi and Henry Purcell, and Michelle O’Rourke does a tremendous job updating this classical repertoire, distilling it to a spectral near-chilling perfection, her voice floating in the mix in a manner that will find favour with fans of 4AD acts, like Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance. Gorgeous skeletal melodies are rendered with grace and delicacy by her crystal voice.
Gintas K is the Lithuanian electronic musician, whose solo works and experiments with granular synthesis have become steadily more challenging over the years, but his work here is just dandy. He seems to have forsaken his interest in severe, alienating minimalism in favour of textures, backdrops, patterns and moods which are all very suitable to the task in hand – heck, at times he even deigns to play in the same key as O’Rourke’s singing. I’m none the wiser about Aoibheann’s abstruse ideas, nor can I see how this record says very much about civilisation and nature, but I expect you need to have been at the event and seen her making her graceful aerial passes on the stage. This record, on the other hand, succeeds like a dose of French perfume inside a Dutch hat from Prague. From 3rd January 2023.