Aleksandra Słyż — A Vibrant Touch

Aleksandra Słyż is an up-and-coming artist in the modern classical and ambient soundscape genre, who released one previous album in 2020.  A Vibrant Touch sees an expansion of her previous methods, which includes a quartet of instrumentalists playing classical instruments, namely violin, viola, cello and saxophone to compliment the sounds of her own modular synthesizer.

Compared to other modern classical ambient composers like Stars of the Lid or Kyle Bobby Dunn, Słyż's music is rougher and more tonally ambiguous, with many moments where dissonant and detuned intervals are sustained.  Though the instrumentation here is largely traditional, chord progressions and clean harmonies are not the emphasis here, with any chord that does emerge tending to be imperfect.  The closest reference point I can think of is later works of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Band, who created drone music with traditional instrumentation from a similar frame of mind, focusing on creating rich textures with their instruments without seeming worried if the result landed within the typical framework of twelve-tone music.

In the opening piece "Healing", Słyż and the saxophonist Marcus Wärnheim exchange long tones, consistently striking a strong dissonance with each other.  The frequencies beat and warble against each other, creating a heavy harmonium-like tone cloud which seems charged with a mystic energy.  As sustained notes are held, each player joins and leaves individually as they feel, the musicians keeping only a loose sync with each other.  The tempo is funereal, as it is for much of the album, the pitches generally changing every three-four seconds.

"The Ruthless Act" is closer to finding traditional harmony than the first piece, sounding like a tense, tragic minor key melancholia.  Again there is a sort of call and response between Słyż's synth and another instrument, in this case, the cello. The two elements don't clash near as much as in the first piece, blending together and at times sounding like extensions of each other.  The modular synth is patched to produce a simple low octave saw wave, likely the closest sound it could produce to the sound of a cello.  Its tone is rich and rounded, and pleasant to the ear.  

Generally, Słyż does not emphasize her synthesizer, placing the acoustic instruments louder in the mix, and restraining herself from the more abrasive and strange timbres possible with the instrument.  The violin and viola are ultimately dominated by the heavier low register tones of the cello and saxophone as well, with much of the album possessing a rather full bass range; deep sine waves from the modular synth and bowed drones from the cello.

The third and final piece "Softness, Flashes, Floating Rage" runs at twenty-five minutes, twice as long as each of the previous, sounding similar to the first, but featuring an uncredited trombone or french horn.

There is a certain esoteric, spiritual emotion in this work of dissonant acoustic drone music, and I find myself partially understanding the meditative yet pained feeling the musicians set out to create.  That said, I do get fatigued by the swamp-like lack of momentum and general throbbing din of detuned pitches, thinking surely it would all possess a greater effect if some kind of contrast emerged.  The timbres of the acoustic instruments are nice enough, but I feel not enough thought was put into the ways these might be combined, or the structure of the sounds they would make.  It is ultimately all too ambiguous and indecisive to sustain my attention for its fifty-minute runtime.  Across its length, there are no significant changes or developments to the initial sound beyond a couple small changes in instrumentation.