Wrapping your ears around Michael Vallera‘s forlorn melodies and smouldering guitar riffs often feels like being drawn into all-devouring emotional quicksands. By turns conjuring up flickering images of barren desert scapes into the baking sun, aimless silhouettes moving under the driving rain and crepuscular Nighthawks-like atmospheres, the work of the Chicago-based ambient artist is one to immerse you from head to toe in its sore, world-weary scenarios.
On ‘All Perfect Days‘, his second LP for Denovali after the sublime ‘Vivid Flu‘ from last year, Vallera spans a variably tempered scale of musical colours and moods, from the torrid to the icy cold, as he stealthily steers his tracks from widescreen spaces into claustrophobic waters, and vice versa.
Lifted from this overwhelming five-track journey across dampened sonics and epic hi to lo-freq shifts, we’re glad to share the gloomy number ‘Pale Watered Floor‘ – a cut where Vallera’s subtle tune-making deploys with unhindered magnitude. After three minutes of anti-music incipit with a single nerve-racking, monotonous synth hum for Ariadne’s thread, the track eventually soars around its half when the piano sweeps in, both deep and radiant, to take the track off to further haunting, melancholic reaches. A compelling glimpse into a wholly unique musical microcosm.
All Perfect Days is released via Denovali on 25th May.
TRACKLIST
1. All Perfect Days
2. In Midafternoon
3. Elon
4. Pale Watered Floor
5. Stare
Discover more about Michael Vallera and Denovali Records on Inverted Audio.