Swim Platførm “SURFACE 2”

11 Jun 2015 — Richard Greenan

Swim Platførm is French sound artist Romeo Poirier. I wrote some months back about "HVAL FALL", his ghostly collaboration with the Norwegian poet Lars Haga Raavand. Now comes Romeo's debut EP, the svelte electronic collage-work of SURFACES.

Accompanied by an analogue photo set, the EP forms a series of lush, aquatic vignettes. These songs glide in and out of earshot, bustling like miniature engines, finely tuned and rhythmically confounding. With the M.O. writ large, it's easy to imagine a submarine benignly combing the seabed. The restrained legato brass on "SURFACE 2" recalls the Cinematic Orchestra – music from a time when electronica symbolised wide-eyed exploration, rather than darkness for the sake of darkness. I think I can hear radar blips cloaked in ice-cave reverb, periscopic grinds and creaks, the clack of gas cannisters, shifting shingle, or the muted flutter of a chlorine pump. "SURFACE 4's" steady churn brings to mind the factory sampling work of YMO on Technodelic: industrial but somehow good-natured, a symbiosis of machinery and wildlife - like an artificial reef or propeller blades smothered in algae.

SURFACES is out this week via Kit Records.