Skyphone
Avellaneda
Rune Grammofon, 2008
By Allana Mayer
Skyphone’s minimalist adventures are over. While the delicacy of their productions remains intact, the Danish trio has edged further from twinkly and moved closer to clunky on sophomore album Avellaneda.
Their looping melodies used to simply suggest rhythms, but now they’ve actually got rhythm tracks. By that I mean they’re incorporating traditional percussion sounds as a baseline, rather than just timing more organic sounds with inorganic precision. It’s most clearly evidenced on album opener “Cloudpanic,” but is less pronounced on the rest of the disc.
Skyphone teeters on the edge of what abstract means: always perfectly structured, almost too left-brain for the creative types. Tracks like “Schweizerhalle” incorporate a slow fade from guitar-picking to knob-twiddling over five minutes, like nothing could ever be so natural. It must be hard work making this look so easy.
Still, like a 200-pound man trying to pirouette, Avellaneda has an awkward and touching grace, a brilliant mix of acoustic and electronic, like what steampunk was trying to be before they got distracted trying to combine mohawks with top hats. The preciousness of their work competes for attention with your own awareness of the intelligence required to produce it. Even the uncompromisingly cheesy ending to “Dream Tree Lemurs” is endearing rather than annoying.
Though the press release states nothing about Avellaneda’s newfound sense of rhythm, and in fact plays up its digressions into more abstract territory, I think the result is a more coherent package, a more clearly defined idea of what Skyphone is and does. Their sound is undeniably theirs, and it’s a damn good one.
