Splash Girl + Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe — More Human

More Human is a collaboration between envelope-pushing Norwegian jazz trio Splash Girl & singer/sound artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. It’s an album that shifts from skewedly atmospheric/soundtracking, onto the warbling ‘n’ wonderingly odd. It’s a release that most certainly takes strange & often unexpected paths, which makes the whole thing wonderful and difficult to peg/ put in one genre/ or sonic place

For the cover artwork, we get a picture of a seal, horse, and bear fairground ride so this really adds to the oddness of the whole thing. It’s a six-track album- with run times between three and eleven minutes- meaning when you drop into a track you are never quite sure how long you’ll sonically swim in it.

We open with the track “Leaner” which starts with slowed and nostalgic piano lines, and expressive cymbal work- with light synth atmospherics appearing later. It sounds like the music from a moving moment in a TV drama, but the whole thing is slightly off/ skewed.  As we move through the album we come to the epic “Landfiller” which blends lullingly jarring tone drifts, creepily mumble/ warbling chants, gloomy bass-bound piano wonderings,  eerier electro-acoustic scrapes, and creepy ping-pong percussive/ synth bass touches.

The title track brings together dragged-out trip-hop beats, dense bass roams, skittering insect-like electro-texturing,  hazed organ/ piano touches, and mournful low-key choir-like hums. The album plays out with “Enthropist” with its blend of ethno-percussive shifts, shadowy vibe darts, weird tone jitters, and lightly morphing bass fumbles.

More Human is primed perfectly if you are in the moody for edgy atmospherics, with both textual & tonal surprise, moments of surreal moodiness, and off-kilter unease