Berlin-based Paula Daunt calls this facet of her output, which goes by Agnosie, her “dark ambient project,” and she recently let two tracks loose on her soundcloud.com/pauladaunt account. They are tasters, as she put it, of an EP that’s close to release. “Close to release” might sum up the pleasures of one of those tracks, “Lost Serendipity,” which sounds like the effusive burst of a pop song held on a tantalizing pause that’s straining to break free.
The voice — there’s clearly a voice in there, based on texture recognition, though not on anything stated, anything intelligible, anything “legible” — is all vowels, the whole thing slurred to the point where, even if there are consonants, they’ve been shoved horizontal, from a hard plosive to a soft aura of semi-wordness. If a comparison to an existing song were necessary, then the most attenuated split second of “Personal Jesus” (the Depeche Mode radio-single version, not Johnny Cash’s mumblecore cover) might come to mind, albeit here that momentary delay extended for five and a half minutes of slomo slurry. Not that it’s all open-mouth sibilance. There’s a near-orchestral soaring that could be a guitar solo, and a rattle that seems like a drum roll pulled apart like taffy.
After yesterday’s entry on classical music being submitted to a more painstaking approach than the Bieber/Jurassic glacial stretching (“If You Slow Down Grieg You Get Ligeti”), this seemed like an appropriate bookend in advance of the weekend.
More on Daunt at pauladaunt.com and twitter.com/pauladaunt. She contributed to the holiday remix project I put together at the end of 2010, Anander Mol, Anander Veig.