Christina Vantzou: No.1 Remixes (CD/DVD)

Why is Nº 1 Remixes such a triumph?

The CD:

Everyone listened. You can hear it in the first track. 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) contributes the only original voice in the remixes making a fair case for the melodic potential of multiple vocal personality disorder. 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. Upon repeated listening, White Rainbow’s track will sound more and more like that song you’ve always had in your library, that B-side where Kraftwerk got some good morphine and rode with all the windows down, down the autobahn — fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n. 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.

In the coming months and over the coming years, Vantzou’s debut album will be seen as a breakthrough achievement. And it’s not that this Remix album surpasses its original, it’s that it equals and furthers it.

The DVD:

Nº 1 is a full length visual accompaniment to her album. The poorly calibrated viewer/listener may fall asleep and never realize how effective the hypnotist was.  The images we are presented with are carefully composed and invite a sense of nostalgia– the footage is partly shot on 16mm film by the artist, partly collected or stolen and changed slightly– but we can’t help but feel a sense of dread growing subtly from within the seemingly benign beauty.

What becomes more and more ambiguous when watching Nº1, is if the music has been composed as a soundtrack for the originally composed images, or if the images have inspired a musical composition.  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, to produce a cohesive, synesthetic experience.  Neither the  9 subtitled chapters of the DVD nor the idyllic slow moving imagery offers a bottom line or linear narrative.  They are rather abstract pieces that seem to only connect 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.

Despite the ethereal space that the sound suggests, one can’t help but feel that somehow, somewhere, there’s trouble, and like the unspecified cancerous disease of the anonymous protagonist in the film’s underlying psuedo-narrative, we feel we can only wait for the worst to suddenly fall down on us.  While harmonies nearly always prevail in the soundtrack, the video offers a strange and uncanny counterpoint to the music- not all is easy and well in this state of ambiance, and we are unable to satisfy our desire to easily synthesize sound and image as we do when watching cinema.  Perhaps because Nº1 is not the soundtrack to the film, nor is the film the music video to the album.  Nº1 is one of those rare music 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 this impressive first album.

Christina Vantzou: No.1 Remixes (CD/DVD):

• Item Price: £11.99
• Listed On: January 25, 2012

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Christina Vantzou

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