Sulci - Four Chambers

 

Released: February 28

Her second album both overall and on the Bricolage label, Sulci’s Four Chambers feels considerably different from her first album. Where her first one felt a bit more like intimate minutiae, this new album feels bigger, airier, and deeper. Everything feels like it sits in a large space around it, like it has real breathing room to allow for all of its little intricacies to flourish. The synth work here is immaculate as well as the album is positively filled with floating pads and vocal-ish flourishes. Percussion certainly comes several times over the course of the album’s eight tracks, plus a deep house-esque remix from Fragile X at the very end. But as far as Sulci’s approach, the percussion feels very tactile, relying on more “live” type sounds rather than entirely synthetic ones. The result is something that has a certain indie-rock flair in an otherwise purely electronic album. 

I think a good example of the above is “Libet’s Delay,”  a track that eateries a very solid bit of drums that espouse an early 2010’s kind of aesthetic with a prominent backbeat that wraps the otherwise floaty synths around it skillfully. The fun little vocal licks that show up throughout give the track a bit of real world grounding as well, which I think really anchors the track in what feels like a more real world setting rather than get tied up in fun abstractions. 

But there are some exception to this in the album as well, like with “Subject Matter.” It’s a track that seems to embody the opposite, allowing itself to float away completely into a lucid dreamworld of nothing but floating synth tones and heavily delayed short vocal licks that play more as brief shots than anything else. It conveniently bridges “Bloodsports” (which is much lighter than the name suggests) and the aforementioned “Libet’s Delay” as both have a more real world feeling despite their ambient abstract qualities. It’s a neat little move and one that doesn’t really repeat anywhere else in the album except maybe at the very end with “Lead Me to Water (Just to Drown Me)” going into the remix of “Bloodsports” by Fragile X, which makes surprisingly higher energy end to the album.