Artists: Acronym & Kali Malone

Title: The Torrid Eye

Label: Stilla Ton

Release date: 14th January 2019

The Torrid Eye is the title of the latest work signed by Acronym and Kali Malone, out on Acronym’s own label Stilla Ton on the 14th January. The two artists are good friends and both based in Sweden, place that functions as creative outlet and perfect setting for this experimental work.

The album was recorded at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, using a Buchla 200 Series modular synthesizer and other analog equipment, then finished in Acronym’s studio with analog and digital processing and real time overdubbing.

The A Side opens with Call From The Tower, setting the mood for the whole album journey: monumental, powerful, sometimes tense, always charged with emotions. Its very incipit starts right up there, flying over an immense Nordic landscape: it’s a view “from the tower”, if you wish. Droney pads paint a sort of sinister mist, ideal weather for a solemn ceremony immersed in nature.

A Sunspot is a peaceful well-crafted exercise, highlighting the key role of analog equipment in the whole work, as the cover of the album suggests: Acronym and Kali Malone stand small next to the enormous machine, as mere executors or the synthesizer’s powerful will. Like weak rays of sunshine in a cold cloudless sky, shrill sounds meet repetitive rhytms, reminding us that we are still in a Nordic landscape: ethereal ambient and pensive atmospheres.

Tempest Of Joy is where emotions meet nature: a crescendo of intensity builds a pattern, still as measured and cold as possible. Perhaps the track most winkling at the dance-floor, it transports us in a supernatural parallel universe, where the reverberating sounds slowly taking over wrap up the journey, in eternal bliss.

Side B starts with Legs Of The Fly, reminiscent of that deep, charged, blackened techno sound that comes from Swedish surroundings.  Heaviness, non-human legs anchored to a soil that’s black, humid and thick, like a modern Icarus who wants to fly but finds out that he just has legs. Dramatic and cold atmospheres deepen the listening.

Tarman closes the mini-LP in the same monumental way as this whole journey started. Soundtrack unveiling a world that’s triumphant and tragic at the same time, perhaps alluding at the strong image that the title (Swedish for intestine, edit.) might recall. Anguishing thoughts, but at the same time tarman is a natural inner place. The focus of the track shifts to words by Karl Sjölund spoken by Marianna Feher, for a solemn end.

The Torrid Eye is an intense LP, despite being made of just five tracks: it’s a very deep journey into the coldest of sounds. It’s the perfect encounter between two universes: on one side analog explorations by Kali Malone, American artist living and working in Stockholm and on the other the great knowledge of his realms by never-disappointing and versatile Acronym.

From the dictionary, torrid “also describes something that’s very energetic, or something that has an extreme emotional charge”: The Torrid Eye surely is.

Listen to snippets of The Torrid Eye here:

(pic by Vincent Battault)