Artist: IT (Irena Tomažin)
Label: Zavod Projekt Atol
Release: 2011
Duration: 45:03
Rating: 4.5/5
Irena Tomažin is the proverbial workaholic, a busy little worker ant. She’s an actress, dancer, singer and then some. Collaborations with all sorts of sonic “manipulators” (or “explorers”, to put it more nicely) are nothing new to her, from Gredoč, BastKolektiv / Aldo Ivančič (ex Borghesia); Alzheimer trio (Tomaž Grom, Marjan Stanič, Matjaž Manček), N’toko, Marko Karlovčec, Seijiro Murayama, Lydia Lunch, Liz Allbee, Hanna Preuss, Wanda, NfMf, and the list is nowhere near complete.
iT is a musical planet all her own, and the album “Crying Games” is, naturally, a one-of-a-kind piece of music. You’ll need nerves forged from climbing cable for this one. The kind you cling to for dear life when you’re defying a mountain ascent to reach the summit! But “Crying Games” is a mountain made of a different kind of rock, so it demands a completely different approach to reach the goal, to get to the heart of what it’s trying to say. Even so, it demands no less courage from you. If anything, more. This isn’t an album for everyone, only for those of you with minds open enough to embrace even the most off-the-wall extravagance of an adventure in musical eclecticism, the kind you couldn’t dream up even on the edge of your craziest alpha state.
We’re talking about three quarters of an hour of musical manipulation: captured sounds on cassette tape, painstakingly delicate transfer of the material through studio sound processing, and cunning fusing of individual sound samples. And the point of this kind of sonic manipulation? Laying Irena Tomažin’s emotional state out straight, right there in the open! Or a whole range of emotional states, or the stringing together of a dense soundscape of the artist’s colorful, shifting landscape of mixed emotions. Through a succession of all kinds of sound loops. It can be narration, an a cappella vocal melody (at its most accessible in Jablana), or just a collection of emotional responses from a human being and their reaction to outside and inside stimuli (breathing, crying, screaming, laughter,…). The “bending” of voices, at times deliberately up into the heights of shrill, sinusoidal curves that thoroughly clean out your ear canals, serves the same purpose of bringing it closer, magnifying the emotional state.
Processing all kinds of sound structures captured on tape into repetitive sound loops is just one of the means of magnifying the emotional state Irena found herself in as she chased that state onto the tape of the cassette recorder itself, though in the new era using a dictaphone was certainly a much more elegant option.
This particular approach to expressing the world we perceive, through the musical universe, requires you to switch off your ratio when listening. No analysis! Otherwise you’ll go nuts in an instant, run away from your CD player, and miss out on a special musical experience, one that, with its content, rocks you piercingly and feather-light into a world of angels where “the clouds make love” (as Irena puts it), and at the same time freezes you to the bone in an instant with moments that, through the implantation of frenetic screams or the manipulation of tapes turned at different frequencies, feel downright chilling.
On the album you’ll be able to recognize individual fragments of well-known pop songs that inspired Irena, and the girl also worked some content from dramatic texts into the album’s vocabulary.
“Crying Games” is a hugely interesting piece of music, totally unconventional, unique and unrepeatable. Listening to it takes your whole self, because that’s the only way it can open up to you fully. This is an album that will definitely shake you up. And that’s one of its basic purposes. While you taste it, you’ll be tasting and discovering yourself. How far into the boundless musical universe do you dare to reach?
I’d like to mention that the packaging design is something special this time around and works in full harmony with the musical message of the product. There’s no classic booklet. Instead you get a “little” album of pictures dressed in a rustic cardboard box (the kind our moms, back in their teenage years, kept their pictures of Elvis Presley and Humphrey Bogart in), which you absolutely have to link up and put together like a puzzle while you listen to this album. On the back of each picture is a print of handwritten lyrics, which demand no less. The packaging design carries exactly the same weight this time as the music itself. You can’t have one without the other. That’s the only way the message of planet iT will fully reach you!
You can order the album “Crying Games” via: [email protected]
Lineup
Irena Tomažin – vocals, dictaphones, lyrics
Production
Aldo Ivančič
Track list
1. Intro: The Crying Game
2. Jablana
3. Wanting Needs / Want It
4. Spi, sanja
5. Ophelia Muller / Who is It
6. ( ) – veter mi piha, iz oči mi piha veter
7. Mad Dog / Stop It
8. Congratulation / Let It
9. Question Of Good And Bad
10. ( ) – koračnica
11. Nekaj v tebi
12. ( ) – melodijca
13. Apple Tree
14. Outro: Give Up Your Crying Game
