Image credit: Rebekka Deubner
‘More Die of Heartbreak’ is the seductive first full-length from electronic composer and multi-disciplinary visual artist Amosphère. Born in China, partly educated in Japan and now residing in Paris, her work came to the attention of a wider circle of listeners when she was invited by Laurel Halo to perform as part of a 10-hour durational ambient concert at London’s Mode Exchange in 2019. Inspired by personal touchstones including Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the subtly wavering grids of Agnes Martin, and the heterophonic layers of Chinese traditional music, Amosphère uses a careful selection of vintage electronics, sophisticated harmonic sense, and keen compositional intelligence to invite listeners into a meditative sonic space. Time expands and contracts, simplicity reveals complexity, and repetition becomes patient transformation.
Spreading out over six expansive yet self-contained tracks, ‘More Die of Heartbreak’ serves as a perfect introduction to Amosphère’s warmly enveloping approach to analogue sound. Developed from scores (contained in the accompanying booklet) using techniques from concrete poetry and graphic notation as well as fragments of traditionally notated material, these six pieces take in a broad sweep of moods and approaches, from the gently burbling layered monophonic patterns of the opening ‘circuit of unconsciousness’, reminiscent of the sun-drenched synth figures of 70s Alvin Curran, to the haunted gliding tones and reverberating pops of the closing ‘melting a piece of cadmium’.
At times starkly minimal and making bold use of the stereo field, Amosphère’s production approach keeps the grit and grain of her analogue gear intact, calling to mind the work of pioneers like Delia Derbyshire and Éliane Radigue. On ‘02:29 p.m.’, a pair of sonorities answer each in a kind of antiphony, blurring the listener’s perception of time and space. In a fashion that connects with the explorations of composers like Ernstalbrecht Stiebler or Gérard Grisey, the temporal continuum becomes a static space that the synthetic sonorities map out and explore. On ‘celestial’, dense organ clusters accompany breathy multiphonics performed by Marion Porquier on bassoon and Alvaro Cavallaro on alto saxophone, suggesting Ligeti’s infinite spaces, while on the gorgeous ‘anti-insomnia’, wistful patterns of ascending arpeggios are strafed with fizzing synth chatter. Calling up a pantheon of electronic music pioneers while shaping her rich analogue sound palette into affecting forms with a distinctly contemporary sensibility, Amosphère emerges here as an artist fully formed, carving out a very personal niche in the edifice of 21st century electronic music.
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