Face Takes Shape - (Grooves #10)

Constructed by Andreas Bertillson out of sounds generated in and by his Berlin apartment building, Face Takes Shape is a curious listening experience. Thanks to it's glitchy domestic comosition, there is an eerie familiarity to the album which filters into profoundly digital estrangement - are those echoes reverberating from the inside of a staircase, or of a microchip? Is that the breathing of the inhabitants, or a synthesized rushing in the inner ear? There's even the odd hint of avant scrawled melody, occasionally washed through with gentle sluices of water to remind that there is a musical as well as soundscaping intent too. There are field recordings too, as sporting activities take place in the distance - or is it television? The questions Face Takes Shape pose are familiar to anyone who has ever laid awake at night in bed and really listened; then concentrated into self-induced sleep paralysis, and been abducted into the fabric of their home and neighbours as it shifts slowly under the pressure of its own construction and social environment. Magnify that experience and scatter the creaks and half-overheard conversations and footfalls liberally with hallucinogenic electronic processing, and the portrait Bertilsson has drawn shifts in and out of focus with deft strokes of the mouse. Dreamlike and somehow conforting too in the lateral removal of reality a few metres from perpendicular, Face Takes Shape scores well over less coherently conceptualised microcompositions thanks to its thorough grounding in workaday ambience. A genuine sleeper, perhaps.