CHRISTINA VANTZOU - No.1: DVD + Remixes
http://christinavantzou.com
http://soundcloud.com/christinavantzou

Christina Vantzou's debut album Nº1, recently released on Kranky, comes with a decoder. It's a full length visual accompaniment made from 16mm footage, animation, and found materials. The images are hypnotic minimalistic and meandering, but while harmonies nearly always prevail in the soundtrack, the film offers a strange and uncanny counterpoint - not all is easy and well in this state of ambiance, and we can't help but feel a sense of dread growing subtly from within the seemingly benign beauty. The nine subtitled chapters of the DVD and the idyllic slow moving imagery are abstract pieces that seem to connect only tangentially- text, sound, and image orbit but never lock into each other, and yet the relationship they create feels like it makes some kind of cohesive sense. The hierarchical relationship between image and sound which we've grown accustomed to from music videos and cinema is flipped upside down and ultimately erased; This is one of those rare projects, whose composition is visual as much as it is aural, whose sound and images are both integral and autonomous, and watching the film gives the listener vast insight into the invisible world of Vantzou's impressive debut.


Tucked in the opposite sleeve of the DVD is a CD of remixes curated by Vantzou. These ten tracks are spun with the distinctive aesthetic yarn of the individual remixers, and the atmosphere is much more intimate and fluid than that of your typical remix comp. What emerges is an inspired full-length album in its own right. Koen Holtkamp (of Mountains) takes the spare approach and makes his case for the grace of the original sounds, slightly shuffled to reveal something like Brian Eno's generative music. You swear this track might have been on the original album, but you're wrong. The next two tracks by fellow Kranky stablemate Loscil and Ernest Gibson III take Vantzou's glacial ambitions and add drops of oily electronic sheen that barely disturb the iceberg, adding that rainbow surface when petrol meets water. Montgomery Knott (Stars Like Fleas) spins in the sole original vocal layer and Ben Vida's (Soft Circle, Town & Country) track may be the most remarkable of them all, transforming hidden vocal tracks into a majestic choral arrangement. Listen to the original, it's all there.


If this was vinyl, you would flip to the second side now where Dustin O'Halloran's (A Winged Victory For The Sullen) track begins as a meditation and concludes as a soaring elegy to neglected spaces. The next tracks by Robert Lippok (of To Rococo Rot) and White Rainbow (Kranky) usher in the damaged glory of recycled beats to marry with the narcotic vibe. But don't get too excited. The final two tracks by the UK's Isan and the Vantzou/Wiltzie (Stars of the Lid) revival, The Dead Texan, remind us all that there is a pillow that awaits us all every night and eternally. The elastic time band stretches and stretches and instead of snapping back, it just gives you "eyes are focused upon evol", a blissful and blessed drag race to a feathered bed.