Christina Vantzou — No. 5

The difficulty in creating such a work is that one false step and the whole thing comes tumbling down. Vantzou's skills as an editor are the real instrument of choice here, weaving a spiderweb of source material that runs the gamut from voice to the drips inside of a cave. It's playful, no doubt, as in the second track, "Greeting", where we hear the refrain of layered "Heys", moving into the shortest and most haunting of the compositions, "Distance", which is like a codex for the entire album. Vantzou is no stranger to ambience and electronic minimalism, but those monikers do little justice to a work that fundamentally upends the teleological structure of ambient composition, because nothing really develops on this album, it's not heading toward fullness and greater richness. There is no end here, no resting place beset with promise, but the intentionality is present, No. 5. is not a work of chance. In Vantzou's native Greek (and the site of most of the recordings and editing that took place), "Telos" is what appears at the end of popular films, the Hellenic version of the French "Fin." In essence, this moment never comes; we are not on the road to enlightenment. 

 

"Memory of Future Melody" clues us into the unique folding of temporal space that is proposed in No. 5. Like a saraband in reverse, moving away from something and not toward it. This is not background music, not ambience in any traditional sense. There is no meditative state achieved, nor should there be, it seems. The sounds on No. 5. are concrete, as specific and materially determined as anything you're likely to encounter; things as they are, not as a means to something else. The word "Stereo" in Greek originally meant "concrete", and Vantzou's editorial skill is directed at keeping her source material as alien and alienating as it is, foreign to both language and listening. Expectations of a brighter horizon will not take place here, which puts No. 5. as not only one of the best albums of 2022, but also a work of truly weird originality for the way it pushes back against the very cultured nature of listening.

 

For fans of Vantzou's work, and anyone who enjoys the surprise of not being fulfilled, this is very highly recommended.