S.O.X.D
"Battlefield" Album
Review by Nikola Tenani
(English translation)
In his long-standing empathy with the industrial side-project S.O.X.D., Vincere Sylph, usually a composer of dark and cinematic ambient sound, continues with pleasure to propose his new modus operandi. But if "Battlefield" was initially a single, it is now an EP made up of five tracks where the title track is dominant with three versions and two new recordings.
And not only has the packaging changed into what is now a highly sophisticated cardboard digipack with an anthracite, rust-colored cover and nocturnal interior sleeves, but also the musician’s Gothic dance enters territory that is increasingly darker. The extended version of the track ‘principe` is dark and dance with echoes of vampiresque voices and parallel, secondary echoes of instruments; stasis and reprise become dance floor trances; the "Flugmaschinen" Remix doesn’t change the mood but increases its beat, increasingly industrial-Gothic, pretentious, a malicious heart under full moons with altered colors.
The two new works are "Angst", a soundtrack of a not-for-teens horror movie and very romantic in tone, in the wheezy breathing of the ideal ‘Beast’ and in the feminine whispers that perfectly recreate the union of Beauty and the Beast, the stereotype on which much material has been written, directed and composed and from which not even Vincere is exempt from trying his hand with an excellent rendering of tension.
The real bonus track is "Salty Marshland", a track of pure ambient electronic music with variegated and stylish evolutions that may remind some people of the more vespertine and melancholic Tuxedomoon or the late-wave experimental performances of Laurie Anderson, a tango between sunset and nightfall along the banks of an ideal estuary where sweet and savory (the taste of tears) become the presence of a sensitive soul in digital territory as well.
One step beyond!
Nicola Tenani
http://www.soundsbehindthecorner.org/the-dancefloor/1500-soxd-battlefield.html
