Pure H — Signia

A remix album with a collection of artists remixing a band I don't know. I guess you have bear with me while I go through these eleven reinterpretations of a song I don't know.

From the few pictures I found online I take that Slovenia-based Pure H is a band in the traditional sense of bass, guitar and drums. Had it sounded as such there's not much left of that in the remixes found on Signia. Even though all pieces are based on the same original (the first track of their most recent album Anadonia) you don't get the feeling you're listening to the same track over and over. At the same time Signia is surprisingly coherent given the fact there's eleven groups/musicians from all over the globe taking turns.

The openingtrack carries a familiar name, Eraldo Bernocchi, but I haven't any solo-endeavors by this Italian artist. The sound of Vision Rising brings to mind Bill Laswell, a producer/bassist with whom Bernocchi collaborated regularly in the past. Deep dubby bass combined slabs of spatious ambient. The ambience is continued by Chris Wood, not the drummer of Medeski, Martin & Wood but a South-African architect and musician. His take is a bit more tribal and less easy to relate to something I know. DJ Surgeon's Enslaved Population is more heavy and doomy while Wodan even adds to that heaviness in H Light, but what do you expect from someone named after a god like that. Blue Waters Turn Black by P.C.M. takes things into drum 'n' bass areas. Richard Dunlop takes an opposite approach with its stretched out slo mo beats that have a more industrial character. The digitally cut-up and scattered soulful vocals that Burp uses slightly refer to Burial. The smoothest and least dark version comes from Moshang while Japanese ambient group Psychedelic Desert are the least beat-oriented, along with K.K. Null from the same country who brings the album to a noisy end (and might be the biggest name involved in this project).

All in all a nice 76 minutes of dark and atmospheric electronic music, probably more representative for the work interpreters than the people who performed the original, going by the few I knew beforehand. The common danger of collections is becoming a rather uneven mix where the flow of the album is disrupted by plunges in quality or huge moodswings, but such isn't the case here. Signia is quite Laswellian release without Laswell being involved, but likely to appeal to those into the ambient dub output by the man, but in spite of its global nature there's no world influence as such.