Last noted the Spanish artiste Rosa Arruti with her Atomic Spy CD…on eXtensions of You (Vol. 1) (GASAG GSA HR 03), here she is again, now working as two aliases, Nad Spiro to provide the familiar layers of processed guitars she loves so well, and as Nadia Spier to remix the results. The plan is that these six episodes of processed grind and groink, subtitled “Excursions Into the Audio-Sphere”, will represent an emotional and physical response to city life, providing “instant electric mutations in the magnetic urban membrane”. Sheesh, she must feel like she’s living in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or in The City in Logan’s Run. While there’s plenty of scrunchy texture and digital reverb to these over-worked gtr-scapes, there’s not much energy either; almost every track crawls along at a lethargic rate, as if the city-dweller were existing on a forced diet of pills that both slow you down and induce mild hallucinations. Give me Franck Vigroux any day…at least you know where he stands in relation to modern urban life. I like the idea that her own alter-ego is collaborating with her from some unknown dimension, but I would also have hoped that this strategy of deflection would have yielded more surprising results than it does here. From 22 Dec 2014.
