The sound palette is largely percussive at least for the first few tracks of Perila’s new album Intrinsic Rhythm, whether she appears to be rustling bell chimes, rattling cutlery or manipulating something more watery and synthetic with only a resemblance to backyard fare like drain pipes and holey buckets, or else mallet percussion and even crystallophones like the glasschord or Cristal Baschet whose rods are delicately rubbed by moist fingertips.
Meanwhile the atmosphere which carries a musky or vetiver scent soon shifts from steeped ritual or such rituals still in their preparatory phase to something more out of the science laboratory, suggesting that these modes might just be one and the same, as Perila hearkens back to early forms of alchemy, places organic matter under the microscope and further blurs what are the already porous borders between acoustic and electric composition, with a sense that life’s vibrations are most keenly felt and best explored by way of the granular and the mundane.
Those ancient bronze bells, gurgling sounds, muffled kicks, vague sines and whooping shreds of static are accompanied by a pastoral field recording on the album opener ‘sur’ where someone appears to be tending to lowing cattle with milk pails in tow, perhaps with a wooden yoke draped over their shoulders as a dog barks in the distance. And after the whisperings and murmurings at the end of ‘deza’, the third track ‘sepula purm’ dabbles in shoegaze then sounds vaguely Celtic, like a petri dish Enya or Sinéad O’Connor warming up for ‘Mandinka’, or perhaps Antonina Nowacka whose spectral moans and nymphic vocals have traversed Polish fortresses and Javanese caves, as Perila layers her voice in the flickering air.
‘nia’ introduces more sustained tones and traces of melody, as slowly oscillating and ringing sines or the bassy low-end drones of ‘ways’ sometimes rush into heaving and wavelike washes of sound, though less like a real ocean or some congealed organic mass than layer upon layer of diaphanous fabric. A few birdcalls at the end of ‘ways’ sweeten the scene, yet on ‘lish’ underground sirens sound their muffled alarm, while ‘realm’ mechanises those birdcalls as the ambiance becomes more furtive and sinister.
On ‘nim aliev’ a drawn-out sine tone lingers over crackling footsteps, with bubblewrap giving way pocket by pocket as Perila adapts to the role of foley artist. The longer ‘mola’ at first traces the pitter-patter of rain with wind wailing outside plus a few jagged crashes of thunder, as though Perila were now in some far-flung cave as gradually every echo and even the flickering of a headlamp which casts looming shadows against the cave walls comes into focus. Then the equally cryptic ‘lym riel’ sounds like a crackling hearth or campfire made from whips of static electric.
Perila has a penchant for tossing stuff out with little fanfare and sometimes not much context, whether a full record or collaboration or else a song here and there, from blackened shards of sound to something more overtly poetic. The secret of her music even as she receives a share of critical acclaim tends to make her work feel intimate and confidential, welcoming and close at hand despite the murky atmospherics.
Recent efforts have included the hopeful and evocative ‘set me free’ and ‘choose four doors do not blink’ for which she described the manner of composition, writing that the track was ‘recorded last night 11pm in bed after watching documentary about and by Fugazi Instrument‘.
More elaborate, she spun Jazz Plates with a kindred spirit in Ulla, as the pair shared a mutual love for Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane through layered vocals and sylvan rhythms plus reedy clarinet, bluesy guitar and impressionistic piano, cited the flow and freedom of the Young Marble Giants album Colossal Youth as she daubed in warm hues with Pavel Milyakov as pmxper and cracked a corner window to embrace the anticipatory hum of the day in the commune of Labège near Toulouse as part of a Maison Salvan residency.
Her music often seems to engage in a process of deterritorialization, somehow chaste yet slightly scuzzy and attuned to the old ways of the internet, but Intrinsic Rhythm feels like her most cohesive and compelling record to date as it takes an angled yet incisive course through her scrapbook of ideas and paints loosely as in aquarelle from all of the colours of her palette.
‘air two air’ adopts stifled and sped-up djembe rhythms within its watery labyrinth, a track which becomes ever more pellucid until suddenly the brief ‘angli’ commences a vocal section of Intrinsic Rhythm as Perila sounds lost at first, her voice reverberating with an equal sense of abandon whether one imagines her in a confessional booth or approaching the chancel. Gradually her confidence grows and she shifts readily between the sacred and the secular, the seafaring and cave dwelling with ‘fey’ especially redolent of Grouper.
After engaging with plainsong, the track ‘message’ bears a sultry and cinematic quality as Perila whispers as though to her own audience:
Hey . . . hey there in the third row. Tell me, are you a bird? Take your time but answer: are you a bird? Cause I feel I am, and I’m wondering if you feel the same . . . Definitely.
‘darbounouse song’ is a ditty about going down to the woods and features the requisite field recording, as twittering birds and footsteps balance out her echoing and sometimes haunting phrases about ‘driving through memories’, an ‘antic lover’ and gestures lost along the way, the singer wishing to both lose and bolster or aggrandise herself or perhaps simply to become one with nature as she sings ‘I’m a big stone, I’m a river’. The dream imagery and use of effects on ‘darbounouse song’ captures the sense of being eerily present at the same time as one views one’s own actions from above, that kind of presence in absence which is both eulogy and a product of quiet despair.
Returning sibilantly from those French prairies, ‘note on you’ is an ode to creation which flirts with the spectre of artificial intelligence, while ‘she wonder’ layers the words and phrases ‘I’, ‘wonder’, ‘under’, ‘she go’, ‘through’ and ‘x’ almost reducing them to mere phonemes if it wasn’t for the suggestive atmosphere and the musical character of the composition, as Perila plays the femme fatale with its hint of menace while calling to mind the spoken word poetry of the ‘human loop’ pioneer Ellen Zweig.
That leaves ‘ol sun’ which suggests the Beasley Smith and Haven Gillespie standard even as the percussive gongs of gamelan music give way to brisk footsteps and a school or rail yard ambiance while Perila’s voice grows ever more near. Indecipherable at first, she is singing an old blues tune about riding hard in order to reach some great yonder, with a few words about stitching and the odd heartsick barb as her carriage trundles off into the gaseous ether.
