Amirtha Kidambi/Lea Bertucci
End of Softness
por David Cortés Arce
Unlike their previous album, which was a revealing and surprising effort due to the excellent display of both artists’ experimental leanings, End of Softness comes off feeling like an unpolished work in progress.
Phase Eclipse, last year’s collaboration between Amirtha Kidambi and Lea Bertucci, was considered as one of the best albums of the year by several music blogs and websites (including this one); six months later, they published their sophomore effort, End of Softness, which was the result of an arduous editing process, mostly because all the material came from the Phase recording sessions and it was remotely put together under last month’s more strict confinement regulations.
On their Bandcamp site, the liner notes state that "the [current] crisis lends a new expression of agony to the torrential caterwauls of Kidambi’s voice, passed through Bertucci’s unforgiving God-play at the tape machine.", unfortunately, between that statement and the actual results lies a significant gap. Yes, the previous album was a revealing and surprising effort due to the excellent display of both artists’ experimental leanings; however, despite the blunt punk attitude professed by its authors, End of Softness’ briefness -just 23 minutes long- makes it feel like an unpolished work in progress.
Bertucci takes Kidambi’s versatile voice and multiplies it, cuts it, processes it, and, at times, tries to create an aura of a certain rapture ("Siren Call"); in other instances, she covers it with light bursts of electronics ("False Profits"). Reverb, delays and loops are not here to generate anything melodic (“Altar of Time”), and there are moments in which the voice sounds so raw, it may lead one to believe that there aren’t any embellishments being added.
“Hysteric Arch” features scratching sounds that are altered and lacerated until reaching the point of pure high frequency noise, but it never becomes too harsh, and the multitude of voices that start wailing and shouting form a rough sea of confusion, a cacophony of the dead and of ghostly and non-existent beings.
According to both Amirtha and Lea, End of Softness is the announcement of a new era, but I can only lament its lack of articulation. They have created a work that is interesting in its concept, but it is far from having reached any concision. From their side, it was probably a lot of fun putting this EP together; from the listener’s end, though, getting through it is anything but. As the journey goes on, interest fades to the point that you no longer care about the destiny.
