Jana Irmert — Messengers (Original Soundtrack)

If you didn’t know any better, you might guess that Jana Irmert’s latest release is meant to accompany something — an installation, a perambulatory exploration of some subterranean environment, or, more prosaically, a film.

Knowing that Messengers is an OST for the eponymous film does little, really, to influence the listening Irmert’s carefully crafted work engenders. Messengers, the film, explores observatories built to study things that no human has ever seen, at least, not directly: the neutrino. Instead, these gargantuan observatories are designed to capture nano interactions, and with the metaphor of these phenomena whose expression relies on unseen concatenations of time, the stage is set for discrete materials of sound to join the subatomic party.

Irmert’s weapon of choice is an electronic organ, which served double duty as both signal generator and object of analysis, whose physical operations were captured and woven into the final mix. This “raw material”, as it were, is processed and smoothed out into the subtlest of details, acting as a dark, atmospheric context for the accompanying visuals. With or without the film, Irmert’s granular diffusion of texture and tone is dreamy and captivating, rewarding both attentive and distracted listening. On tracks like “Inside The Cocoon” or the final and longest cut, “Monuments To Our Questions”, Irmert manages to surreptitiously smuggle in something akin to longing; almost but not quite as palpable as desire.

Fans of spacious ambient work with a language somewhere between Eno’s Music for Airports and Lawrence English and loscil’s Colours of Air. Highly recommended!