The Answer Is In The Beat

Michel Banabila: The Unreal Realm (Tapu Records, 2024)

May 7, 2024 at 8:21 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

This album gathers several of Dutch composer Michel Banabila’s recent choreography scores and collaborations. The title track, an ominous piano crawl, serves as a good intro which doesn’t give away what’s yet to come, which can be quite surprising. “Lineage”, featuring kamancheh (an Iranian bowed string instrument) by Salar Asid, comes from the score for Yin Yue’s choreography Somewhere, and it begins as an elegant neo-classical piece before changing directions and becoming submerged under rushing waves of electronics, ending up a sort of aquatic post-industrial wash. “The Process from Birth”, another lengthy piece from a different choreography, is more suspenseful and has more cinematic percussion. “Timeless Tide” is closer to slow-moving ambient techno with haunting ethereal vocals. “Bogus Dominion” (with saxophone by Mete Erker) has more of an industrial crunch and charging rhythm, with piano lines that scurry around like insects. “Inward Spiral” features Machinefabriek, and it’s a more sparkling, calm ambient piece made less gentle by slow, sporadic scrapes of distortion. Inventive electro-acoustic artist Pierre Bastien adds various delicate, chattering textures to “Ambiance Subaquatique”, which does manage to sound like playing with Tinkertoys in a submarine. “Night Eyes” surrounds Dave Liebman’s sax and flute with rattling glitches and electronic mist. “Mind Shifts”, one last lengthy choreography piece, starts out as a dark ambient storm before a heartbeat of a techno kick drum emerges, and it ends up prgoressing to a euphoric state in its final minutes.