Enlaire by Joan Jordi Oliver

Enlaire is the debut album of Joan Jordi Oliver. After several years of constant experimentation and devotion to new music, mainly focused on the electronic manipulation of the sound of his saxophone, Enlaire constitutes an important shift in his artistic production. The visceral gestures and a clearly performative and improvisational approach present in his previous works are here substituted by an evolving landscape of carefully crafted abstract electronic sounds, where any sense of a possible musical agent vanishes in favor of a different notion of sound as space, sometimes peaceful and welcoming, other times threatening and asphyxiating.

A persistent fascination with the sonic complexity and emotional potential of noise permeates most of the production of the album, as the synthesized sounds are heavily processed, cut, multiplied and multilayered, while several iterations of distortion and a battery of digital effects completely disfigure the identity of the original sounds, to the point where their transfigured voices merge in a dense, ambiguous and always morphing sonic texture. However, these destructive manipulations are contrasted by the lyrical nature of the musical motives, always fragmented, never fully developed, but constantly present through the blurriness of the music, almost as an insinuation of beauty and fragility hidden in the fog of noise.

Without fully abandoning a sense of narrativity, evidently present throughout the whole album, the music explores some of the core concepts of the ambient genre while also challenging them. Joan Jordi Oliver constructs his pieces meticulously, designing looser or more firm architectural forms that might insinuate some sense of place, an incomplete, fragmented landscape that the listener must discover and reconstruct on their own. As we continue to face the consequences of the global pandemic, the motivation behind the creation of this album might be the same as the experience it tries to deliver: the possibility to create a momentary, alternative musical and emotional space, only to get lost in it and to be both comforted and confronted by its musical intensity.

Label for New Music and Conceptual Art