press

by chris shevlin

This odd, magical music sounds as if it has been piped in from another world, from beyond the forests, beyond the clouds and the ice. Many of the songs feel like prayers or incantations, as though a love spell were being cast. The scratchy warmth of Ana’s voice, her expressiveness, whether whispering, intimate, little-girlish or raised in full-throated belting roar, catches you and carries you along, through the lovely sounds. The album was recorded in a remote studio in Iceland, and you can hear the place in the music: ancient, fragile and ghostly. It is music of the snow, like Sigur Ros or Beth Gibbons.

The best description of this music, and the best accompaniment to it, are the images and photographs on the band’s website (thetechnoillogicalmyopia.com). These cold, spare, beautiful landscapes reflect the band’s sound perfectly: hidden, glimpsed through fogged windows, through ice, taken eerily out of context, with light echoing through them. There is a teasing quality to them, a kind of remote playfulness, as in a puzzle or a poem.

Robert Graves said that he tested poetry by reciting it to himself as he shaved: if his bristles stood on end, he knew he had a true poem. The Technoillogical Myopia pass that test.

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