Metavari ā Soft Continuum (Vital Shores Electronic Music Company)
Soft Continuum (Studies Vol.2) by Metavari
Human voices can be detected in just a few tracks of Soft Continuum, an intricate, synth-driven symphony: at the beginning of āKings Die Like Other Men (Rediscovery),ā when intelligible language gradually slips beneath a tide of woozy electronics; in āDrift,ā when altered voices waft over pointillist, stop-start glitchy beats; and near the ends of āFluxā and āBloom,ā when staticky spoken word again sinks below a liquid swell of elongated electronic tones. In between, the human imprint comes indirectly, in sprightly melodies and stuttering beats, in sonic textures that are a little too pretty to be real, chopped into irregular pieces and left to glow and sparkle in an alternate space.
Soft Continuum is, in some ways, a retrospective for Metavariās Nathaniel David Utesch. The composer lost his long-time musical collaborator Ty Brinneman to cancer in 2020, setting off a bout of reflection over his synth/new age projectās past. Soft Continuum reconfigures compositions from Metavariās 2009 album Be One of Us and Hear No Noise in bright, rhythmic electronics.Ā
A large majority of these tracks have a conceptual arc, tracing the death and rebirth of a star. You know this only because Utesch tells you so, however. The music abstracts themes of collapse and regeneration into bright bars of sound, dissolving and decaying at their edges. Still, thereās a definite progression to the three āArcā cuts, a sense of time and distance and change, as the music erodes to hiss and whoosh, then reforms slowly.Ā
These cuts are precise and richly textured, reminiscent of Jon Hopkinsā cosmic work. But they also have a positive momentum, a sense of drive and purpose that links them to rave-y, dance electronics artists like Fuck Buttons. The artist incorporates a range of live instruments, including heavily reverbed drums, bass and keyboards, into his pieces, but these organic sounds take a secondary role. The main action is in intricate overlayers of synth, MIDI and keyboard that interact in fractal complexity, as on the Tangerine Dream-ish āMirrored Dance.āĀ
Not having heard the 2009 record ā itās pre-bandcamp ā I canāt really tell you how much Utesch altered the music or whether the current iteration is better or worse than the original. It is entirely engrossing, however, in this latter version, like a sci fi movie created by extraterrestrials, glittering, abstract and inscrutable.Ā
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This record is for Ty Brinneman. āDespite distance and season.ā
First and foremost, this new re-imagining of Metavariās 2009 debut Be One of Us and Hear No Noiseis a tribute to original band member Ty Brinneman. Bassist Ty Brinneman was diagnosed with a very rare but extremely dangerous form of cancer called pleural mesothelioma in 2018 and itās been an uphill climb ever since. Nate Utesch saw anā¦
"An Exercise In Rediscovery" : Metavari Reimagines Debut Album As 'Soft Continuum'
āAn Exercise In Rediscoveryā : Metavari Reimagines Debut Album As āSoft Continuumā
Before Metavari became a one man operation, the Midwest band was a full-on post-rock outfit that consisted of seven members. In 2009 the band released their debut Be One of Us and Hear No Noise, played SXSW, and shared the stage with bands as diverse as The Appleseed Cast, Maserati, This Will Destroy You, Tortoise, Bear in Heaven, and Titus Andronicus. As the years went on the band became a oneā¦
