Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Alterra
Label: Buba
Release: 2008
Length: 43:37
Rating: 3/5
I’ll admit it – I’m someone who fell in love, belatedly and posthumously, with the lines of artistic inspiration that make Miladojka Youneed, quite rightfully, the loudest, most provocative and at the same time one of the most pop-oid avant-garde links in the evolution of Slovenian music. After the original intellectual building blocks scattered, a vacuum opened up in this middle-of-the-road current of Slovenian music, and the gap is also being filled by Alterra, who, at least when it comes to making original music with added value, and in their ties to the audiovisual media outlets of television and theater expression, are the direct heirs of the great moments of the eighties and nineties. Alterra’s members, after all, honed their craft in the aforementioned Miladojka, in Lolita, and in the bands that form the cornerstone of the HC scene of our admittedly small, sparsely populated, but damn creative nation. With the progressive bent of those original bands in mind, I dove into the record Synopticon, which is one more piece in the mosaic of understanding the globally oriented hypnoticism of the notions of the global, pop, and the mononuclear system of media sameness. Pluralism of creativity or impoverishment? Synopticon presents its own vision, offering listeners a dozen standalone sketches, stories and vignettes in record form, meant for something more than just carefree hip-swaying and choreographed dancing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3hxwrzJ5Ng
Alterra decided to settle scores with media single-mindedness after the satellite-injected intro of the track The Icon, which opens up the registers of cosmic weightlessness with the binary code of rather dark, or at least heavily darkened, pop. Similar recipes have been around before, I admit, but despite the associations with Schizophonik’s contours and with Liberta Bloo, Alterra keep plenty of room for a narrative of their own. A strong line is staked out by the massive bass sound, tamed by former Miladojka man Igor Ožbolt, under a rhythmic staccato complemented by Mirsad Šabič’s playful drums, while masses of keyboards and samples, tamed with Vanja Novak’s sensibility, weave into the whole, and, in the manner of Miroslav Lovrič, Dare Tome plays with verbal accents this time. A composition that seems very catchy at first glance, also given the watery structure of the flowing track Liquid Reality, turns out rather narrow in auditory terms, suggestively critical but repetitive. The Existence lightens the whole thing up a bit and pours a little more funkoid jazz playfulness into its lungs, but the lungs of the track, which eases the tension in a somewhat dreamier way this time, don’t get enough air for it to fully escape the already-heard patterns of the rather loud dictate of the past. Alterra are a well-connected whole, where the game of critique and narrative commanding goes on simultaneously with the dance-floor looseness and weightlessness of well-composed pop, but they don’t have all the aces that would make me, at least, believe them completely on first listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2OYLqeOy9o
The favorites on this record come to you very gradually. Part of the revelation may also be the Orwellian little number 1984, where Alterra use a recipe shortcut that gets the desired shock effect fully nailed for the first time. The postmodern society of media-integrated, mindless individuals melts before your eyes and between your ears, in a big bunch of impoverished ideas and soulless linguistic oceans of dying, self-grown identities, in a rather Laibach-esque way that is nevertheless damn sweet and danceable. Konsumdiktatur continues the established suspense with a funkoid weave of the eternal desire for more, while the libertarian dictate to satisfy every appetite is fascistoid and robs and narrows the space of freedom. Brave New World has got another soundtrack, and Alterra deserve credit for knowing how to stimulate at least that part of our sleepy brains that until now was assigned to satisfying the primal desire for enjoyment, only this time the pleasure is spiced up with a hellish dose of anti-globalism and a craving for revolt. Reinvent can be revolutionary in name only; the rediscovered lukewarm water sounds lukewarm in sonic terms too, though by no means in a bland and boring way. It just needs a few more balls of its own, if you ask me. The cycles of repetition are microcentric this time, too, since Alterra start repeating themselves in their own way even within the borders of their own universe. Brand New Guru becomes tangible in the mellotron jazz rhythm of Media Mind Design, and the Anglo-Saxon glorification of a fast-paced life, feeding, consumption and ultra-fast orgasms becomes immanent in sonic terms too, McDonald’s style, though it’s marked by production that’s above the standard for our labels. Still, the question keeps coming up more and more often of whether there’s enough originality on the whole to believe the entire construct without thinking of the steely dictate of the past, so the filler in the spirit of the art-for-art’s-sake Blue Mountain or Doppelgänger is just a distraction, a disturbance, needless noise that you get anyway, at the artists’ whim. The ballad undertones of Oku no Hosomichi thus become just the last ballast of beauty on your ear endings, and the title track Synopticon, after trumpets of sweet play with tongues and meanings, brings a discharge. The static of a funeral march and the dark contours of a farewell to dictators, to the media injections of the modern intellect, raise the question of whether revolution and evolution are even still possible for an individual shackled in these bonds, a human without the badly needed room to breathe and grow. The brilliant finale is this time the bearer of the added value that I could only feel in pieces across the whole record.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdlBwsOYibw
Synopticon is a condensed record that, taken as a whole, is meant not only for dancing and fun but – and here I mean this first and foremost – for contemplation, listening and taking note of content without which swimming in the sea of the global can be anything but liberating. Wagner once realized his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a whole; this time the audience melts into a conglomerate of sound and image. The media dictate is clear and, in this condensed form, damn constricting, and Alterra managed to tailor their critique of the new social order, the brave new world of dumbed-down and enslaved individuals, into a very listenable bundle of very listenable songs that, despite all the effort, are missing something. A few grams of originality are missing, and maybe a few more grams of sharpness. Synopticon is certainly a wonderful, self-contained whole, but this time the Gesamtkunstwerk is a bit claustrophobically narrow, and despite its hypnotic repetitiveness perhaps a bit too lukewarm and permeable for the end product to have the desired effect. Still, you have to know that Alterra are a band who, besides the auditory channels, also occupy the visual paths to understanding, and those were completely neglected this time, which is exactly why the whole can’t be judged by a single product or a single song. Synopticon is an idea that’s definitely worth building on and continuing, and with sequels, breaking free of the shackles of the past is possible too. The past, after all, has drowned out the progressive tones of the present …
Lineup
Vanja Novak – keyboards, samples
Dare Tome – vocals
Igor Ožbolt – bass
Mirsad Šabič – drums
Production
Alterra
Tracklist
1. The Icon
2. Liquid Reality
3. The Existence
4. 1984
5. Konsumdiktatur
6. Reinvent
7. Brand New Guru
8. Media Mind Design
9. Blue Mountain
10. Doppelgaenger
11. Oku no Hosomichi
12. Synopticon
