"Piano notes floating in the middle of granular clouds, slowly waking up a giant malicious entity." (Loose Lips)
"Graffito is a quite varied, richly textured and adventurous album on which Corporation take us on an at times cinematic, at times more abstract journey of juxtaposed lush ambiences but also tense mysterious melodic and rhythmic stabs of tone, metallic texture and sound manipulations." (Fluid Sonic Fluctuations)
GRAFFITO by CORPORATION (Keru Not Ever & Racine) is a volatile point cloud forged from a peculiar alloy, a paradoxical blueprint inviting multiple readings. Various perspective lines can be tracked but it never becomes explicit what space, what landscape, which geometry is being sketched, where these lines of inquiry precisely converge. The sound approach is diagonal, smeared, aerosolized - but as the diffusive movement advances the quantitative turns qualitative and moments of pure texture turn ornate, verticalized again - the phase transition is complete. During this state of emergence, iridescent precipitations, multi scale order and newly formed domains ossify, only to venture into the fracture zone again, to crumble into dust, to roll along the path of entropy. Yet time linearity has no business here and many crossroads are offered, insinuations to loop back, to overlay, to spin the arrow of time like a top - resulting in an entangled sound agglomerate that is transient in contradictory senses: with both a fleeting, elusive aspect as well as the intermittent sharp time differential.
THINKING THE THINKING OF GRAFFITO
"(Music slowly fading out…) What to do when one gets asked to write a description? It is in this question that the space of the circular drawing of Graffito appears. Music accompanies, but always traces and presents itself as a metaphor; the words, the sentences are tragically peripheral, to the point where they, not knowing where to place themselves, constantly miss the show. It’s impossible to get out of it, the metaphor waits for us, stalking us and asking for its clarification indefinitely, like a demon on our shoulder or a virus in our stomach: what did you have to say? "Express yourself!" It would be tempting to say anything about it, but it would be unbreathable, the request will always be made, against our desire, from its periphery, in front of its law.
So Graffito is a gift to our inability to say anything. It is there, its gaze passing each day, more and more alien to us, multiplying itself, weaving itself, becoming what we would never have believed it, like a child becoming ineluctably stronger than his hosts, his parents. But the gift remains, the murmur never ceases: infinite-generosity. We read cards and here’s what was written: "smog powder blindness endless sun of a land like no other". Cards force you to shut up: gratitude-à-la-John Cage. "Isn’t it that the description will be the projection of what we would like to project? Naturally, the answer is simple, are you moron? — I guess, but at least I feel the warm wind melt around my hand and my shaved skull, like in a car ride (where the smell is a fine balance of honey and tar), and I can not tell if this feeling is close to The Metaphor, its reality or to a polyphonic laughter I’ll never ever seize. It’s better now, isn’t it?" (…The lulling music is still playing from the terrace, immaturely.)"
This is synth minimalism of the “Warm Leatherette” variety, with plinking analog electronics and wry, disaffected vocals. Bandcamp New & Notable May 20, 2019